Welcome guys to joyfulbite.info Today I am sharing my top 9 Healthy eating tips for anybody who is beginning to eat better or wanting to work more healthy eating habits into their diet or into their lifestyle. For me, when I first began to stop dieting and really commit to eating better for the long term, I used clean eating as my guideline, which is where clean and delicious came from.
So my definition of eating healthy is simply this, eating real, whole, unprocessed foods as close to their natural state as possible most of the time. So eating foods like vegetables, fruits, healthy sources of carbohydrates like sweet potatoes and grains, high quality sources of protein, and healthy fats like avocados, nuts, and seeds.
9 Healthy Eating Tips
One of the most important pieces of this process is realizing that it’s not about jumping on a fad diet or on to the next health craze. It’s really about making a long-term commitment to a lifestyle shift for yourself. This way you are not feeling like you are a victim to mood swings and cravings that come with healthy eating a lot of highly processed, nutrient-void foods.
Tip #1
Allow yourself to be on the journey. When you are a beginner adapting new lifestyle changes and habits, you have to give yourself a little bit of space to figure it out. Don’t feel like you need to do everything at once and everything at the same time.
You don’t need to have all your food perfectly prepared and you don’t need to stop eating all of your favorites. This is going to be a process of learning how to do things a new way and that’s going to take a little bit of time. So if you notice your brain wanting to go to that all-or-nothing style of thinking just recognize that that is a diet mentality and that it doesn’t work. What you want to do is give yourself a little bit of permission to slow down, create some space, and learn.
Tip #2
Healthy eating does not and is not supposed to look the same for everyone. You can be a healthy eater and be a vegan, you can be a vegetarian, you can be a meat eater. You can be a weightlifter. You can be a yogi. You can eat two times a day. You can eat six times a day. And you will also notice that your lifestyle will affect the type of healthy eating.
So for example, a young student versus a working mom of two with a family versus a young professional, right? All of these people can healthy eating diets and you will see that their plates look very different based on the style of their day and the style of their life, right? So there’s no hard fast rule here other than that simple tie-in that we are eating real whole unprocessed foods as close to their natural state as possible most of the time and we are enjoying the food that we choose.
Tip #3
Cook as often as you can. Making your own food is one of the easiest ways to eat better because you are in charge of all of your ingredients. So you know exactly what you’re working with. And here’s the deal. That doesn’t mean that you have to cook every single thing you eat. Just try to get into the habit of cooking more than you don’t. And technically, my friends, that is only 51% of the time.
Tip #4
Focus on quality over calories. Now, I have noticed for many people, definitely I’ve noticed this for myself, when you are focused on counting calories, you tend to get caught up in feelings of restriction and deprivation.
And that is because when the brain gets to work trying to stay under or at a certain amount of calories, what it tends to do is pay attention to what it can’t have or what it needs to be restricting or what it needs to be eliminating.
And those thoughts, that thought process creates the feeling of deprivation. Now, if you switch your focus to quality, the brain starts looking for things that it can add into the diet. And all of a sudden, food becomes a whole new playground, and it’s fun, and it’s creative again. And so not only does it feel good, but it tastes good.
Tip #5
What grows together, goes together. When you buy foods that are in and of the same season, they automatically taste good together because Mother Nature has our back. So in case you’ve never noticed,
things like Brussels sprouts and grapes, butternut squash and cranberries, berries and basil. These foods all grow in the same season and they all taste amazing together, which is really good to know because it takes a lot of guesswork out of your cooking.
So a great way to have a little bit of fun with this is maybe when you go to the grocery store you pick up one to two new ingredients each week and experiment with it in your kitchen. Try a new method of cooking it,
I don’t want you guys to feel overwhelmed or intimidated by trying new ingredients, And one last thought and good thing to keep in mind is that when ingredients are eaten in the season they grow in, they both have better flavor and a higher nutritional value. So it really truly is a win-win to eat with the seasons.
Tip #6
Have some back pocket recipes. When you are transitioning into healthy eating, it is so helpful to have a handful of recipes that you know that you like and that you can make in a reasonable amount of time.
So I recommend having a few BPRs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then slowly but surely as you experiment with new things, when you have a keeper, you can add it into your back pocket. This way when you feel like you don’t have any time to think, you can always lean on this list to help you stay aligned with your healthy eating goals.
Tip #7
Learn to read your labels. Learning how to read your labels is a really easy way to recognize what’s going into your body and a great general rule of thumb to follow is to simply focus on the ingredient list. You want that list to be five ingredients or less and you want to make sure that each ingredient you can read, recognize, and pronounce.
Tip #8
Avoid highly processed foods. Now just to be clear, a lot of healthy foods are slightly processed. So for example, oatmeal is slightly processed, quinoa is slightly processed, frozen vegetables are slightly processed. I mean basically if it’s not coming straight from the farm or the field it’s going to begin a series of processing. But these slightly processed foods are not the foods that I am referring to and they are certainly not the foods that you need to be concerned about.
The foods that you want to be avoiding are those very highly processed foods. These are the foods that are going through lots of steps and lots of processing before they ever make it to your plate. Some people like to call them franken foods.
These are basically foods that are made in the factories. And here’s the thing, the real problem with these foods is that they are so concentrated in fats, sugars, and salts that they really wipe out your palate because they’re bombarding the taste buds with this concentration of fat, sugar, and salt.
And so we can’t appreciate the natural flavor and subtleties of real whole foods. And I do think that this is why healthy eating gets a bad rap. So if you find that you do eat a lot of highly processed foods,
What you wanna start to do is baby step your way out of that so you can start to appreciate real whole subtle flavors again and of course you want to work on learning how to infuse lots of flavor into your foods with herbs and spices and by watching lots of clean and delicious videos.
Tip #9
Avoid artificial flavors, sweeteners and non-fat foods. These artificial flavors and sweeteners are literally designed to bypass the logical part of your brain and trigger all of those pleasure points in the brain. So what happens is you find yourself wanting more and more and more, and you don’t really even know why. You kind of feel like you’re not in control
of the whole show, because sort of you’re not. And because it’s not really real food, your body is not really even sure what to do with it. Plus, we tend to play this little psychological game with ourselves when it comes to fake sugars and non-fat foods which doesn’t really count so I can have more of it and I know that all my dieters out there know exactly what I am talking about. And studies have shown that eating artificial sweeteners actually creates more desire to eat more So we actually end up cutting our nose off to spite our face.