5 Ways to Make Healthy Eating Easier in the New Year
January 09, 2018If you’ve resolved to eat healthier this year, we want to help you with these five ways to make healthy eating easier!
1.) Let Go of the Idea that Healthy Eating Has to Be an All-or-Nothing Thing!
Our bodies are wired to be able to handle a little crap, so don’t sweat it. Your body certainly isn’t! It’s really our MOST of the time that matters most. Even further, the stress, anxiety, and guilt that goes into trying to make eating healthy a 100%-of-the-time experience for yourself are actually way worse for you than a handful of French fries. So let go of the idea that healthy eating has to be an all-the-time thing -- as long as your most-of-the-time food consumption is healthy stuff, you’re good!
2.) Get Down with Frozen and Canned Plants!
Frozen and canned (BPA-free cans, please) plants are the ultimate healthy dinner pinch hitter. Defrost some frozen veggies, cook some quinoa, add a sauce and some rinsed, canned chickpeas, and boom! Dinner. Or bake a sweet potato, defrost some frozen veggies, sprinkle in some black beans plus a slice of avocado and boom! Another dinner. How about cooking some brown rice pasta, opening a can of tomato sauce, mixing in lentils and kale and pouring that over pasta? Dinner. If you keep your home stocked with frozen vegetables and some canned beans, you’ll make work-week dinners so much less complicated and challenging than they’ve been!
3.) Ditch your Worry about Being High Maintenance or Weird.
It’s challenging enough to eat healthfully on a day to day basis, but letting others’ opinions bring you down too makes being healthy TOO hard… and too upsetting. I’m not saying that the eye-rolling, remark-making folks aren’t in the wrong for making you feel bad about your healthy choices — they absolutely are, but they’re probably absolutely envious of your impressive, unwavering dedication to your health that they hardcore struggle to have. So try to just let it go and be proud of yourself for the admirable way you treat your body.
4.) Make Extra When You Make Anything!
If you’ve gone through the impressive effort of carving out time, gathering healthy ingredients and following a recipe to assemble and then cook, then why not make your healthy eating a thousand times easier by making a few days’ worth of healthy lunches too? DOUBLE THAT RECIPE! Triple that quinoa you’re cooking, quadruple that pesto you’re making, hell – quintuple those snack balls, so you have those suckers for weeks!
5.) Outsource Some of Your Effort!
Healthy eating is supposed to fit into your current life, not require you to start a new life. So to fit healthy eating into your current life, don’t have any shame using some of the support systems that keep popping up all over the place for us. Between delivery services (for meals, snacks, smoothies, and groceries), more affordable equipment (spiralizers, small high-speed blenders, and mini food processors) and pre-prepared items (zucchini noodles, frozen smoothie packs and cauliflower pizza crusts), there is no longer a need to be your own one-healthy-person show!