7 Simple Steps to a Healthy Diet
Renew’s mission is to bring about a renewed world by helping remove the bad from our bodies. But once you feel renewed, how can you make sure you stay that way? Easy: stay active and maintain a healthy diet. Renew is only the first step in your journey: just imagine how far you can get with a smart, healthy diet unimpeded by toxins.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that making a lasting change in your diet is difficult, and at times it feels even impossible. We’ve all BEEN committed to making a healthy change, and then given up after a few days with no soda or burgers or what have you. Establishing a healthy routine takes time, conscious decisions, and unfaltering commitment. It also takes those initial baby steps that turn into leaps and bounds until you get to where you want to be. With that being said, we’ve assembled some tips to help you ease into a healthy diet.
1. Start tracking everything you eat by keeping a food journal. While this may seem trivial or tedious at first, it requires you to acknowledge all that you ingest: every calorie, carb, sugar, etc. Writing it all down will help you realize how terrible you are treating your body. Then you’ll begin making more well-thought-out choices about what you put in your body.
2. Prepare your own meals. By eating out regularly, you’re putting copious amounts of processed and overly enriched food into your body. While you may see a calorie count on a menu, or a list of ingredients, you will never fully know what all you are ingesting. By preparing your own meals, you control the ingredients, what they are and the portions of each. As you prepare your meals, you are setting yourself up for a healthy lifestyle: if you have a healthy option that you prepared and brought with you to work for lunch, you are less likely to go for fast food.
3. Keep it Simple. One thing that I have found through my personal experience with dieting attempts is that I try to jump in full throttle and make all of the healthy recipes that I can find on Pinterest. Essentially, I create a lofty, difficult to accomplish idea in my mind of what it should look like. The reality is, you don’t have to be a walking recipe book to create tasty, health-conscious meals. Think of your diet in terms of color, freshness, and variety. And when in doubt, just think “protein & veggies.” It doesn’t have to be extravagant — it can be as simple as chicken and broccoli, or salmon and zucchini. Don’t allow yourself to become discouraged and give up just because you don’t know how to make recipe X, Y or Z. Keep it simple, colorful, and fresh, and you’re golden.
4. Reduce your sugar intake. Sugar is one of those tricky little guys who’s in just about everything. And while it is VERY difficult to avoid it completely, reducing your sugar intake is possible. Simply read ingredients, and avoid foods with high levels of sugar, molasses, high fructose corn syrup, etc.
5. Smaller portions. We’ve become accustomed to extremely oversized portions, sometimes eating two to three times more than we should in one sitting. To remedy this, eat breakfast every day, and eat small meals frequently throughout. This boosts your metabolism early on and keeps it going strong throughout the day. It also ensures that you do not over eat, which should definitely be avoided.
6. Drink a ton of water. Start off your day with a cold glass of water, drink one glass prior to every meal, and one in between each meal. Drinking a glass before each meal helps you avoid over eating. There are also countless health benefits to staying hydrated, from better circulation, to clearer skin, to improved focus and mood — there’s no downside to staying properly hydrated.
7. Avoid eating late. As I said, you want to eat small meals throughout the day, but you should not eat after 9pm (varies based upon your bedtime/wake time etc.). This gives your body the time to burn off the excess before going to sleep. Eating large meals before bed is an unhealthy habit, as your body is not active and does not require foods-fueled energy to sleep. If you simply cannot avoid a late night snack, then stick to something low-carb, like celery and peanut butter, or almonds and cheese.
We know that making a lifestyle change is difficult, but your health will definitely thank you. Hopefully these 7 tips can help you ease into a healthy lifestyle as painlessly as possible. Because as you’re getting Renewed, you want to keep your body primed and ready for whatever life holds.
