When planning a healthy diet, think about small steps that can help you change your diet. Then commit yourself towards these steps and gradually you will find yourself taking a healthy diet even without noticing.
Choose Your Diet
When choosing a diet, identify a variety of foods that make up a balanced diet. The food recipes you choose should be foods that you love. These will ensure you are not bored and that you don’t give up on your healthy diet plan. The major factor that discourage people and make them quit is taking foods they don’t like.
Start simple and slowly make your diet healthier day by day. Make sure to use fresh ingredients in all your food preparations. Fresh food stuff has more nutrients than preserved or processed foods.
Change Your Eating Habits Gradually
Change of eating habits must be a step by step process. People who try changing their diet overnight end up giving up. A diet change requires that you make small manageable changes bit by bit. Start by adding small portions of the ‘new foods’ to your usual diet. For example you can switch from cooking with solid fat to cooking with liquid oil- like olive oil.
These small changes on your diet will at the end become a habit. When you make a habit of adding more and more healthy foods to your daily diet, you will soon be taking a healthy diet.
Every Diet Change Matters
The goal of planning a healthy diet is to look good, have added energy and minimize your risk of getting diseases.
This does not mean you must be perfect. It also doesn’t mean you get rid of the normal foods you love. What counts is every portion of food that you add into your common foods. Whenever you add some healthy food into your diet, be sure that you are making progress.
Developing Healthy Eating Habits
You can learn healthy eating habits just like you learn to do other things in life.
Do not think of food as something you just pick on the store or on your way home. A healthy eating habit begins with choosing valuable foods that adds up to a balanced diet.
Then nurture your eating habits gradually;
Enjoy chewing your foods: Do not be in a hurry to swallow your food. Take time and feel the flavor of your food and its texture as well. Chew every bit of food that gets to your mouth. These will cause you to enjoy eating your food and also help you avoid mindless overeating.
Eat together with other people: This has both emotional and social benefit to your health. You will find it enjoyable when you eat while others are eating. This also encourages you to eat enough, especially when eating foods that you are not used to.
If you eat while watching TV or working on your computer, you will end up overeating.