I’ve shared tons of healthy recipes here but I’ve never really shared my healthy eating philosophy. I guess that’s because it’s really not the special or unique. It’s just the way I live.
My junior year in college I recognized that I had put back on the freshman 15 that I had lost the two summers prior. One day, I just decided that I would start tracking my meals and counting my calories in order to get my weight back down. This simple strategy has allowed me to attain and maintain a healthy weight for the last four years.
Healthy eating has become such a routine part of my life that I really don’t even think about it anymore. Sure, every now and then I’ll reach for some french fries and ice cream, but, on the whole, I prefer to satiate myself with wholesome, unprocessed food.
But for those of you just starting the path toward a lifelong healthy eating habit, I thought I would put together my top five tips. Keep in mind, I’m not a nutritionist or a doctor. These are just strategies that have worked for me and I hope they work for you too.
1. Plan Your Meals
In our house, we’ve taken planning meals to a whole new level. Every Sunday before I go grocery shopping, I reach into my recipe drawer and pull out 5 dinner meals for the week. I use these recipes to develop our grocery list and then add in our staple items that are running low.
I’m sure this sounds incredibly micro obsessive but it keeps me sane, organized, and free from wasting food. I know personally that the last thing I want to do after work is troll around my refrigerator hoping that I have some ingredients to make a healthy meal. Instead, I come home, look at the 5 recipes I have picked out for the week, and select the one I feel like making that night. It requires zero brain power (which I have very little left of that late in the day) and I don’t have to scramble for ingredients and make last minute substitutes.
I have found that if we don’t plan meals a) we don’t have the right amount of food in the house and b) we are (I mean I am) more likely to get overwhelmed and just buy some takeout.
Planning 5 dinner meals ahead of time ensures that Mr. A and I have at least 5 healthy dinner meals every week and that Mr. A has 5 healthy lunches as well (he’s always in charge of the leftovers).
2. Count Calories
I’m sure a lot of you out there really hate the idea of obsessing about calories and trust me, I not suggesting you obsessive about them, but rather that you become aware of the calories you put in your mouth everyday. It will astound you.
When people first start down a healthy eating path, most of them have no idea how many excess calories they are consuming every day. When you start to realize what a serving size of chips looks like, it’s truly mind blowing.
To jump start your calorie counting, you first want to figure out how many calories you should be consuming every day (just google it to find some great resources). Then once you’ve got your total in mind, start using a food calculator to track your progress throughout the day (Calorie King is great for this).
Once you get the hang of it, slowly you won’t need to be so methodical. You’ll have an idea of how many calories common food staples have. While I’ve definitely become more relaxed about calorie counting, I still measure out my dinner. It’s the one component of my daily food intake that changes everyday so I don’t know what a typical serving size looks like. So every night, I calculate the recipe’s total calories and then figure out how many servings I need to get me to my ideal dinner calorie total (I aim for 400 calories).
3. Keep It Simple
This is pretty self explanatory. The easier your healthy eating recipes and lifestyle are the more likely you are to stick to it.
Pick simple recipes. You don’t need to make a dinner with 15 ingredients. In fact, some of my favorite dinners take less than 20 minutes to prepare.
Another way to keep it simple is to develop a food routine. I’m not the kind of purpose that thrives on tons of variety in my food. To keep my sanity and my healthy eating on track, I eat the same things for breakfast and lunch every day. Then to spice up my day, I make a different dinner each night. This way I have variety but I don’t go crazy inventing new breakfast and lunch ideas every day.
4. Buy the Right Food
Don’t buy junk food, save those treats for special nights out. If you have convenient junk food sitting out, you are more likely to grab that than something healthier. We don’t keep cookies, french fries, or doughnuts in the house for this very reason.
Also if you know that you are not the kind of person to make healthy food from scratch, spend the extra money and buy the convenience healthy foods—cooked brown rice, diced veggies, frozen veggies, hardboiled eggs, etc. In the end, it’s better to spend more money on healthy food that you know you will eat than to waste your money on cheaper, unprepared healthy food that you never touch.
5. Schedule Cheat Days
My tips above focus on ways of controlling your surroundings and behavior so that you don’t tempt yourself with unhealthy food. But the only way you can keep your temptations at bay for an extended period of time is to allow yourself to cheat every once in awhile. It makes your life more bearable and healthy eating more enjoyable—because no one likes hanging out with a starving, unhappy skinny person.
I’ve scheduled my cheat days on the weekends when I know I’m more likely to be in situations where I can’t count calories. I make a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner for myself Monday-Friday and then I allow myself to splurge on Saturday and Sunday.
While at first this may seem self defeating (like you are eating away all the pounds you lost during the week), gradually you will find that your appetite for unhealthy things lessen. You will know what it feels like to fuel your body the clean way and you will value that feeling more than a greasy cheeseburger. So slowly, these cheat days become less of challenge and more of an emotional break. Just know that everyone once in awhile you deserve the kind of deliciousness and fulfillment that only a brownie or a slice of cake can provide. It’s okay to indulge that part of yourself every once in a while. You are human after all.
So those are my five tips for a healthy eating. They are by no means a comprehensive guide to everything that I do to control my eating but they certainly are the major strategies that have worked for me.
For all you guys out there trying to eat healthy, congratulations, you are making one of the wisest, hardest, and most important decisions in your life. I give you a lot of credit for taking charge of your future.
Now I’ll turn the floor over to you. What are some of your healthy eating tips?
