Are you ready for this? The key to healthy eating is changing your behavior slowly in a simple, incremental way so that new behavior becomes second nature. It just becomes part of your everyday life and it absolutely does not look like a short-term diet. Think about this for a second. When you start a diet you decide to completely overall your behavior and what you eat in one day. I can hear you saying that you just really need to make a drastic change. I get it. But let’s make a long-term change. One that sticks.
Short-Term Diets Lead to Short-Term Changes
Instead of focusing on short-term diets that frequently lead to fluctuations in weight and fail to deliver long-term changes let’s get real. If you want to maintain a healthy weight, or lose body fat, or even just feel good then you need to eat healthy.
What Does Healthy Mean?
Healthy means eating primarily whole, minimally processed food and a wide range of them. Your plate should have many colors on it. Not just that common meat and potato tan color. Let’s get some green, red, yellows and heck, throw some purples in there!
Real Food = Real Nutrients
Your body wants real food and the powerful, feel good nutrients that it needs. Processed food is lacking in these nutrients and are engineered for you to over eat them. There’s a very good reason why you can’t put that Dorito bag down.
Start With Portion Control
Here’s our first simple step to eating healthy. Let’s use the size of your hand to portion out the right amount of food on your plate. So 1 palm size for protein, 1 closed fist size for vegetables, 1 cupped hand for carbs and 1 thumb size for fat. Hopefully you were doing strange motions with your hand as you followed along. If not, no worries you can check out our latest video on Instagram TV where I show this portion guide in my kitchen. Focus on one meal and start adjusting your portions. Print out the infographic here from our friends at Precision Nutrition and put it on your fridge. Remember this is a new skill so it will require some time and attention until it becomes engrained in your everyday life.
Practice Until It Becomes Second Nature
But here’s the key. This is a change that you can do for the long-term. You can eat the correct portions of food for your body and lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. What about when you go out to eat? Order a healthy meal and check out those portions on your plate. Too much food? Time to get a box.
For more tips on nutrition, exercise, mobility or just to say hi follow us on Instagram, check out our Facebook page, read our tweets and finally watch me on our Instagram TV Channel.
