8 Simple Ways to Become a Healthier Eater

As I have mentioned before, we live in a society that encourages all but healthy eating. This happens thanks to the monstrous business of food and both internal and external pressures to maximize profits. A majority of the artificially modified foods and beverages we habitually ingest have the potential to get us “hooked” on their amazing smell and taste, thus we come back for more. But when they are consumed over long periods of time however, they deteriorate our health.

You will learn [hide]

Table of Contents

Issues with Modern Food

Have no faith in big food companies.

Far from caring about our well-being, they claim that they give people what they want and our choices are a personal responsibility (of course). No kidding!

Interestingly, many people are reluctant to find out where their food comes from because they deep-down know the scenery isn’t pretty. Combine that reluctance with a fear of change and you have a consumer base ripe for the picking. It is important, however, as a human right to know the nature of whatever we are consuming.

Based on this knowledge we can choose to agree with it, ignore it or maybe even oppose it and demand quality rather than quantity.

Furthermore, our food choices are based on what is available, affordable and convenient, not leaving behind culture and taste.

There are a few basic yet powerful recommendations that you can follow and will be surprised of how much it can impact your life for the better without the need to go on a fad, ridiculous, depriving diet:

8 Simple Ways to Become a healthier Eater

1. Limit the ingredients

Instead of trying to decipher complicated food labels (some of those ingredients are hard to recognize and even pronounce!) reduce or avoid eating products that contain more than 5 ingredients. This is what differentiates a whole food from a food product.

But be mindful that even 2 or 3 ingredients food can be just as bad or even worse.

What we really are trying to stay away from are all the packaged convenience foods loaded with chemical fillers, preservatives, additives, colorings, and artificial flavors, sweeteners…

2. Avoid the middle aisles

Highly processed food products are strategically placed on the shelf of the middle isles so it can be found easily in the supermarket. Fresh foods and/or most whole foods (which are perishable) are found on the peripheries since they need refrigeration.

3. Shop local

Whenever and as much as you can, shop locally and visit farmers markets; where food is always seasonably fresh and in most cases organic.

4. Don’t believe health and nutritional claims.

I had fallen into the trap of buying whole-grain goldfish crackers for my son, just because the package said “whole grains”. Until I read the ingredients I came to find that they were made with “smiles and whole wheat flour” but the fibre content was not significantly different, which is one of the reasons why you would buy a whole grain product in the first place–not to mention they contain some unhealthy ingredients as well.

5. Choose plant based foods

There is an incredible body of evidence that adopting a plant based diet has a positive impact on our health and wellbeing. You do not have to give up animal food, but remember that the diet of the animals we eat does have an impact on the quality and healthfulness of the food itself. So go ahead and enjoy a steak or even better, some liver and onions, but be sure to consume animal derived foods from animals pastured raised (grass-fed) and not treated with hormones or antibiotics.

6. Move more!

And give yourself credit for what you do that involves physical activity. You don’t need to be a marathon runner to be considered physically active, but eating healthy and sitting around all day will not make you the healthiest person, either. Being active burns more calories; helps heart, bone and muscle health and it helps your body regulate the process of digestion, therefore how your cells use up all of the nutrients that come from food.

7. Eat fresh

And I don’t mean eat Subway. What I mean is to learn how to cook from scratch. There are thousands of recipes that use fresh and healthy ingredients. Try following a new recipe once a week or even once a month. A friend of mine started a “dinner club” with her girlfriends where they get together once a month and take turns hosting the party by cooking a healthy recipe.

This is a fun and brilliant idea to step inside the world of Real Food cooking!

8. Don’t stress about food

It does more harm than good to meticulously think and exaggerate the concept of healthy eating to the point where we become isolated and overwhelmed with information and worrisome about the dangers in our food.

Nobody is perfect (even the people who you think look and eat perfect) and just as you can enjoy healthy meals more often, you can also enjoy a supreme pizza once in a while without feeling guilty or having a premature death. Habitually eating junk food is what creates the problem.

Becoming a conscious eater will transform you into a healthy eater. When we have awareness about what a healthy meal actually consists of, we will think beyond a salad. A healthy diet is not as boring and complicated as it seems.

We can certainly move forward into changing little by little the way we eat, enjoy and think about our food.