3 Healthy Eating Tips

Healthy eating is not about strict nutrition philosophies, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. Rather, it’s about feeling great, having more energy, stabilizing your mood, and keeping yourself as healthy as possible.

Healthy eating is all about ‘eating smart’. It involves not only the content of your food but also the way you consume it. Food plays a major role in determining your chances of acquiring diabetes, cancer, and heart ailments. Proper food also plays a role in fighting depression. A healthy diet will give a boost to your energy, will sharpen the memory, and will also regulate the mood. Planning the right intake of foods will go a long way in maintaining optimum health.

Healthy Eating Tip 1: Set yourself up for success

To achieve overall success, planning is essential. Do not view the plan as a huge challenge but treat them as small steps that can be managed. Commitment is important. A step-by-step approach is essential to achieve success.

• Learn to simplify: Do not limit your plans to counting food calories or cutting down on portions. Always view your diet in aspects such as freshness, color, and variety. Incorporate foodstuffs that you love. Learn simple recipes that require fresh and healthy ingredients. Over a period of time, your diet will become more wholesome and healthy.
• Slow but steady wins the race: It would be foolhardy to expect overnight results. Your goals need to be realistic. Making drastic changes to your diet would make you crave more for these foods. This can upset your plans. A small step, such as including a salad in your meal, will go a long way towards good health. It is also advisable to substitute butter with olive oil, while cooking. These small changes will eventually lead to more healthy choices.
• All changes matter: Your goal should not be to attain perfection. All foods that you crave for and enjoy are not necessarily unhealthy. The goal of healthy diet should be to have an overall sense of well-being. Elimination of the risk of diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart ailments should also be your goal. There might be minor glitches in the execution of your plans. However, do not let these discourage you.

Healthy Eating Tip 2: Eat in moderation

People often think of healthy eating as an all or nothing proposition, but a key foundation for any healthy diet is moderation. The stepping stone for a healthy diet is moderation. Remember the old adage: You must eat to live and not live to eat. Healthy diet should not be treated as an all-or-nothing proposal. A healthy diet should contain a proper balance of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, and fiber.

• Do not completely ban particular foods: When you decide never to touch a particular food item, you are only increasing your craving for it. And if you give in to the temptation, your plans might be ruined. A good way to reduce cravings for sweet and salty foods is to reduce the portion size. Decreasing the frequency of consumption will also help. This will help you to avoid dependence on the foodstuffs over time.
• Reduce Portion Size: Different restaurants offer different portion sizes. It has increasingly become trendy for restaurants to offer large portion sizes. It is a good idea to share a dish with your friend or, alternatively, opt for entrées. While at home, use dishes that are smaller in size. Visualization of particular dishes can go a long way in maintaining a healthy diet. You can view your serving of meat as a size of a card deck. The slice of bread should not be larger than a compact disc.

Healthy eating tip 3: It's not just what you eat, it's how you eat

Healthy eating is about more than the food on your plate—it is also about how you think about food. Healthy eating habits can be learned and it is important to slow down and think about food as nourishment rather than just something to gulp down in between meetings or on the way to pick up the kids.

• Eat with others whenever possible: Eating with other people has numerous social and emotional benefits—particularly for children—and allows you to model healthy eating habits. Eating in front of the TV or computer often leads to mindless overeating.
• Take time to chew your food and enjoy mealtimes: Chew your food slowly, savoring every bite. And no, you can't just take bigger bites so that this is a reasonable amount of chews; take small bites also. We tend to rush though our meals, forgetting to actually taste the flavors and feel the textures of our food. Reconnect with the joy of eating. Eating slowly helps to keep the amount of food you're eating small until you feel the satisfied feelings. It also prevents you from gorging yourself, and gives you more time to accurately reflect on whether your stomach feels full yet or not.
• Listen to your body: Ask yourself if you are really hungry, or have a glass of water to see if you are thirsty instead of hungry. During a meal, stop eating before you feel full. It actually takes a few minutes for your brain to tell your body that it has had enough food, so eat slowly. If you are hungry between meals, go ahead and have a healthy snack. It's not good to starve yourself between meals. If you allow yourself to become too hungry, you'll just overeat when the meal comes. It's all about listening to your body.
• Eat breakfast: Eat breakfast and eat smaller meals throughout the day. A healthy breakfast can jumpstart your metabolism, and eating small, healthy meals throughout the day (rather than the standard three large meals) keeps your energy up and your metabolism going.
• Avoid eating at night: Try to eat dinner earlier in the day and then fast for 14-16 hours until breakfast the next morning. Early studies suggest that this simple dietary adjustment—eating only when you’re most active and giving your digestive system a long break each day—may help to regulate weight. After-dinner snacks tend to be high in fat and calories so are best avoided, anyway.

Change from eating whenever you can and exercising only when you must' to 'eating only when you must and exercising whenever you can.' Most people like eating, and don't like exercising. The result is that they eat every chance they get and exercise only when they have to. You must change your thinking around, to exercising being the necessity and eating being the luxury, and work towards developing a lifestyle that reflects this.