I bet you’re a bit like me, my goal has always been to eat healthy without obsessing over every little thing. I see so many people online who want to be healthier and then they start running marathons and become a certified nutritionist.
That is not my goal at all.
I want eating healthy to be easy.
I don’t want to obsess over every little thing I’m eating.
I don’t want it to take up any of my brain space.
I want to eat healthy, yummy foods that fuel my body and then move on with my life.
Why does that seem so difficult to do?
There are so many fad diets that blow through it’s hard to know how to start eating healthy. Here are my 5 steps to start eating healthy for beginners.
1. What’s your ultimate goal for your body?
I don’t believe in dieting.
All dieting is, is depriving yourself until you reach some magical number, then you go right back to your unhealthy habits and gain the weight right back.
If you don’t make permanent changes, then your weight change will never be permanent.
I believe in making sustainable dietary changes. I don’t want to start something I can’t keep up. I’m okay with temporarily cutting back on a few healthy, but higher fat/ calorie foods like nuts, seeds, and dried fruit, but I don’t think they need to be entirely eliminated.
I choose health over weight-loss, so I refuse to try any diet that could affect the health of my body. What’s the point of being skinnier if you’re going to die faster? Personally, I want to be smaller and healthier.
I want to look good and have the energy to run after my kids.
What do you ultimately want for your body?
2. Follow a system to reach your goals
I love habits and productivity guru, James Clear. He has a great article about why goals alone won’t get you results.
You can have an awesome goal, but if you don’t have the systems in place to work towards that goal every day, you’re not going to achieve it.
Goals are a great way to set what direction you want to go, but you need to figure out what to do daily to get you closer to that goal.
I want to healthily lose 30 lbs. That’s great! It’s a very clear goal, I’ll know when I’ve achieved that.
But just wishing every day and meditating on losing 30 lbs isn’t going to get me anywhere. Instead, I ask myself, what daily action can I take to reach my goal.
So, for me the daily action I can take to reach that goal, is to focus on eating Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen. I’ll explain what that is in just a sec.
I will also limit my nuts/seeds and dried fruit to one serving a day to help with my weight loss. They’re healthy foods, but can cause weight gain if you overdo it, which I tend to do (hello, one jar of peanut butter a week :D)
My System – The Daily Dozen
My go-to resource on the healthiest way to eat is Dr. Greger’s non-profit site, nutritionfacts.org. Dr. Greger is a physician who’s made it his life’s work to research all the research that’s published on nutrition and relay the latest findings. His book lists the dozen healthiest foods you want to try to eat on a daily basis. He calls it the Daily Dozen.
Here’s a video explaining the Daily Dozen:
He’s also created a “traffic light” system to help you determine what foods are healthiest.
Green light (Go, the majority of what you should be eating): Unprocessed, whole plant-based foods
Yellow light (Caution, eat these if they help you eat more green light foods): Processed whole plant-based foods and unprocessed animal-based foods
Red light (Stop, stop and ask yourself if you really want to eat these foods): Processed animal-based foods
Here’s a great video that explains it in more detail:
I love Dr. Greger because, not only is he not doing this research for profit, but also his focus is on what to eat, not on what NOT to eat. It feels like a goal to achieve instead of a restriction.
Whatever system you choose to follow, crowd out your old way of eating with healthier choices.
3. Create a plan for success
You know when you find a new recipe that you absolutely LOVE and make it 3 times in a row? That’s what we want to do, just with whole food, plant-based (WFPB) recipes.
Don’t worry about depriving yourself of your old favorites, instead, look for delicious new recipes that you can’t get enough of!
Deprivation is not the goal, nor is it sustainable. We want to eat delicious food every day.
Now, not every recipe will be a home run, but keep a list of those that are. I don’t recommend trying to convert one of your regular recipes into WFPB unless it’s already mostly WFPB, you’ll just be disappointed. Instead, pull that recipe out for special occasions.
If you’re having a hard time finding foods to be excited about, check out Pinterest for ideas. I’ve also started looking at menus of vegan restaurants for ideas.
The great thing about WFPB meals is it’s pretty easy to recreate recipes- after all, if the ingredients are all whole foods, it’s not hard to figure out what they are. It’s just tweaking the spices and sauces.
It’ll at least give you a good jumping-off point. I’m all for getting some inspiration and then doing your own thing.
Keep a running list of foods you love and new recipes that were a hit.
4. Think of potential problems you might encounter
It can get a little trickier if you need to accommodate special diets. I have a husband with renal failure that needs to watch his potassium and phosphorus levels and is not very interested in eating WFPB and a baby just starting to eat solids.
I focus on the foods that I eat alone first (breakfast, lunch, and snacks), and then try to find ways to adapt the meals we eat together (dinner).
A lot of times it involves subbing tofu, soy curls or TVP for the meat in my husband’s meals. It’s still a work in progress and I don’t stress if I just eat whatever my husband’s eating for dinner.
One of my other downfalls is getting too hungry, at home or outside. To counter this I try to keep some grab and go snacks in the house and my purse. I also know a couple of healthier fast food options I can eat if I need it.
What potential problems could you encounter? How will you deal with them?
5. Progress not perfection
I aim to eat WFPB 80% of the time. I want my food every day to be almost entirely green light foods, with a few yellow light foods scattered in. I try to keep red light foods reserved for rare treats.
This is still very much a learning process for me. I want to have a better relationship with food so I can teach my daughter to have a healthy relationship. I had a lot of food aversions during my pregnancy and wasn’t able to eat most of my go-to WFPB foods. I was too tired to fight it, so I reverted back to my not so healthy habits. Those habits have continued post-baby, and I’m working to get back to a healthy diet.
This is all about making better choices every day, not making some cold turkey, drastic life-altering change.
It’s also not about trying to be perfect and beating yourself up when you “mess up”. There is no messing up, this isn’t a diet, this is your life. Make a better choice with the next meal.
Progress, not perfection.
It doesn’t matter what you eat on holidays, it matters what you eat every day. Just don’t make every day a holiday.
Ask yourself at every decision, what would a healthy person choose? Is this bringing me closer to my goal or further away? It’ll take practice, but you can do this!
How to eat healthy for beginners
- Have an ultimate goal to work towards and then
- Find or set up a system to help you make daily choices that move you closer to that goal.
- Create a plan for success by crowding out the bad foods with better foods,
- Plan for potential problems, and
- Focus on progress, not perfection.
you can start eating healthy without having a lot of struggle.
Don’t expect perfection overnight, this will always be a work in progress.
Your health is a lifelong pursuit, it doesn’t have to be hard.