I used to think that eating healthy meant deprivation. It meant suffering through bland food until I could meet my weight-loss goal and resume my normal eating habits.
As I learned from experience, suffering through a diet only to resume your old eating habits is a recipe for regaining all the weight you just lost—plus some. To be truly successful, eating healthy has to become a way of life.
While you can still eat delicious foods, the primary shift is that you will be making different choices about what you eat when you are striving to be leaner and healthier.
Here are 11 tips for making the shift to healthier-eating easier:
1. Instead of focusing on all the foods you can’t eat, concentrate on all the foods you can.
2. Fully appreciate the foods you are eating. If you are eating an orange, appreciate the farmer who planted and cared for the tree. Appreciate the sunshine, rain, and soil that helped that orange grow. Appreciate the people who picked, packaged, and shipped the orange to the store or stand where you purchased it. Appreciate the worker who put it in the display so that you could buy it, and all the people who keep that store open so that you have ready access to an abundance of food. Appreciate the color as you remove the peel, and the tangy sweet scent. Appreciate the wonderful burst of flavor on your tongue. Appreciate how it’s nourishing your body. Appreciate your body for fully receiving those nutrients and energy.
3. If your dietary plan is flexible enough, set times (perhaps once a week or once a month) when you will allow yourself to eat some of the foods that you love that aren’t on your healthier-food plan. Then fully enjoy those foods when you have them.
4. Remind yourself of all the reasons you want to be healthier. It’s helpful to write these down so that you can refer back to them often.
5. Actively learn about the food plan you are choosing. When you understand the reasons behind what you’re doing, you are more likely to stick with it.
6. Instead of focusing on how much you hate cooking or new foods, think of it as a culinary adventure or challenge that you want to master.
7. Set a goal for trying one new food or recipe a week.
8. Instead of focusing on how little time you have to prep healthy foods, make it a priority and schedule the time into your week. How can you make it fun?
9. Learn to use spices. Spices have no calories and add lots of flavor, and often important micro-nutrients.
10. Make double batches of foods that you like and freeze portion sizes for quick, healthy meals on the go.
11. Use the Internet. There are an amazing number of healthy recipes out there that you can match up with your health-goals.
How can you shift your thoughts and expectations about healthy eating from deprivation to delicious? What difference does changing what you think about what you are eating make in your ability to create a healthy lifestyle?
Together we can do it!
Goss Coaching 
Great ideas. I’m printing this and hanging it on the fridge.
Awesome! Glad you found it helpful!
Great post! I have recently discovered that “chewing” makes a huge difference in how quickly I feel full. If I take my time to chew slowly and thoroughly, (Tip #2 “appreciation”) I feel full more quickly and evidently I am getting more nutrition than when I just wolf down a meal. Hugs! Thanks for a really useful list.
Love that! Great addition to the list.
This is the first “Tips for Healthy Eating” list I’ve read in ages (and I read them all) that actually has something new and interesting to say. I love the idea of actively thinking about and appreciating healthy food as you eat it. When you think about food in those terms, it’s so much easier to learn to love that orange than it is to love all of the chemists, machines, and admen responsible for, say, your plate of frozen microwavable chicken nuggets.
That made me laugh out loud! It’s so true. When we practice appreciating our food, we automatically begin moving towards food that is purer and more natural–that are easier to appreciate. Thanks for commenting. I could ask for a better compliment.
Great Blog Hanna! One thing I’ve committed to doing this year is to join a CSA. I’ll be having fresh, local food delivered each week beginning in May. The CSA I joined has a local chef who is going to post recipes specific to that week of harvest. Perhaps this is an idea that your readers may find useful for them too! I found mine through http://www.localharvest.org/.
Awesome suggestion, Cathy! Thanks so much for sharing.
Excellent post, Hanna!! Excellent tips!!
Thanks, Joyce!
Great post! I especially liked 6, 7 and 9!
Thanks! I appreciate you!
Spices are the “spice” of life (please excuse the pun.) I cannot imagine cooking anything without a pinch of this and a dash of that.
I am battling high blood pressure and therefore must watch my salt intake carefully. Mrs. Dash has a wonderful assortment of low sodium really tasty spices. No recipe needed, just sprinkle it on a veggie MMMMM.
Also, fruit juices make foods taste good, especially citrus. They add sugar but not as many empty calories as white sugar and they also add vitamins. Turkey injected with equal parts of lemon and lime juice is to die for.