picture via pinterest
Improving your diet doesn’t mean only eating vegetables from now on. For me, healthy equals balanced because any extreme is never healthy.
I implemented subtle changes into my own diet to shift my diet from eating mostly highly processed foods to a balanced diet which is serving my body with five simple but powerful steps.
1. set an improvement habit
Whenever you attempt to improve any area of your life, improvement has to be made a habit. With a habit, which is a simple consistent small effort, your mind can learn information instead of getting fed huge chunks of data where only little gets processed and even less remembered.
Said ‘Improvement Habit’ combines action and information speeding up the improvement process since it’s an effective learning method.
Now how could such a habit look like?
Trying a new recipe a week is a great start. Use the depth of the Internet to find a recipe that’s relatively healthy and seems to be something you’d enjoy.
Personally, I would choose one that seems doable on a workday since the goal is to cook instead of heading toward unhealthy processed foods most days. Set a concrete time and date to try a new recipe and gather the required ingredients beforehand (more on grocery shopping later).
By experimenting with different recipes you explore what meals match your taste so that healthy eating which is often associated with the term ‘unenjoyable’ becomes enjoyable. Did you enjoy this week’s recipe? Great, write it down and sort it into a folder. Then you’ll have a collection of easy, quick, healthy meal ideas for meal prepping and you already practiced the motions.
2. Add color to your meals
Vegetables and fruits have so many benefits and vitamins and they can be enjoyable too, some of them at least. Regardless, there are still enough fruits and veggies to add to your plate. Whether that be some fruits as an afternoon snack or to add to your breakfast or some veggies or salad to your lunch or dinner.
Personally, I like to make myself a smoothie instead of a soda or prepare a quick cucumber salad complementary to my lunch. Similar to the ‘Improvement Habit’, this builds another habit that will come naturally to you one day.
3. Meal-Prepping
If you don’t have time to cook and prepare lunch and dinner every day, meal prepping helps you to eat healthily throughout the week. It saves time and money and is really convenient since you cook the meals once or twice a week and easily store them in your fridge and reheat them in a couple of minutes.
Having healthy and balanced pre-cooked food in your fridge prevents you from ordering food or eating out because you just have warm it up and obviously don’t want it to go to waste.
With your weekly ‘Improvement Habit’ you now have a collection of meals to meal-prep for the week.
As far as storing your food goes I would suggest containers suitable for the microwave, the freezer, and the dishwasher and are stackable as well.
I linked a few options on my amazon storefront.
4. Clear Grocery Lists
Before grocery shopping write a clear grocery list of items you actually need and stick to it. This might be hard at first but it’s easy to get distracted and add more items to your shopping cart than you need.
Planning your grocery trip can save you money and is helpful when you’re meal-prepping. Through that, you have more control over what goes into your body because if you just have x amount of snacks at home you can only eat x amount of snacks and it’s easier to resist cravings while still honoring them by having some snacks in the house.
5. Don’t go grocery shopping hungry
Going shopping hungry has such a noticeable impact on my purchasing behavior.
Naturally, when we’re hungry our instinct to satisfy our biological needs kicks in and we’re urged to be on the lookout for food to keep us alive but when we’re full we don’t act on instincts and the food loses its initial appeal.
Whenever I visit the grocery shop hungry I add a thousand more things to my cart that I don’t even need. This ends up not being profitable for me or the environment therefore I avoid shopping hungry whenever I can which leads to more rational buying decisions.
By changing up things you normally already do like shopping for groceries you can gradually shift your health and overall well-being without any drastic changes or a restrictive diet. With some planning and a set improvement habit, you’re well on your way to steering your life in the direction you desire.
