5 Ways You Can Eat Healthy On Autopilot

In the my last post, we discussed the ways you can get started with healthy meal planning.

A lot of us underestimate the value of meal planning in healthy eating. When we don’t plan our meals, we will rely on our instant decision-making when our willpower is low. Hence, we will reach for our cravings when the time comes to eat.

To put it another way, it’s absolutely necessary to attain the skill of meal planning if you want to live a healthy lifestyle. Instead of relying on your decision-making power at the time of eating, make pre-planned decisions so that you don’t face decision fatigue. You’ll choose healthy by default when you’ve already planned or prepared meals in advance.

Today, I’ll give you some strategies on how you can make meal planning easier for yourself. These strategies will simply your food choices and reserve your decision-making power.

Routinization

Routinization is a way to regulate your food choice decision-making process or actual eating behaviors for reoccurring situations into habits and automatic behaviors.

For example, eating the same healthy breakfast every day. If you eat the same breakfast on most days, you’ll not have to make decisions every morning. Your decision-making power will be reserved for later decisions.

You can start by preparing a simple healthy smoothie every day that you can have for breakfast. You can definitely tweak the ingredients as you wish. In fact, it’s good to have a variety of foods in your diet. So feel free to experiment and drink up a smoothie that you enjoy!

Elimination

Elimination excludes particular foods, food category, eating location or eating partners from all food choice options or make an exclusion for particular settings.

After identifying the bad eating patterns from tracking your eating behaviors, you can start to eliminate the environments, foods or settings. It’s much like — out of sight, out of mind.

For example, if you’ve identified that you eat junk food in the night then eliminate the situation by either removing the junk food from your home, going to sleep early or having a proper healthy dinner followed by a ritual (e.g. dishwashing) that determines the end of your feeding for the day.

Limitation

Limitation reduces the use of selected foods or ways of eating to simplify food choice decisions. It is different from elimination because it requires establishing acceptable levels and then monitoring adherence to those limits.

For example, you can decide to allow acceptable levels of eating out per week.

Limitation is a way to allow some flexibility in your diet so that you stick to healthy eating for most of the time and still enjoy foods that you like as you’ve already set the limit, time or situations for yourself. You can also use limitation as a stepping stone to eventually eliminate certain foods.

Substitution

Substitution replaces foods or ways of eating to accommodate conflicting values by replacing one option with another that is more nutritious and satisfactory.

For example, you can choose olive oil instead of hydrogenated vegetable oil. Swap sugary drinks or soda with water. Eat healthier snacks like fruits and nuts instead of going for the usual unhealthy options.

Addition

Addition selects particular foods or include food components to satisfy specific needs. The needs refer to nutritional needs or the need for pleasure in our meals.

For example, you can have a salad with every dinner or you can add a piece of fruit in your smoothie to enhance its taste. Similarly, adding vinegar or lime may enhance the taste of a salad.

Lastly, make sure to find a balance between health, taste, cost, convenience or any other value. Meal planning and preparation should make your life easier and healthier. It is not meant to add additional stress in your life.

If you don’t have enough time then you can either hire a chef (which is not an option for most people) or make time because your health matters. Let go of extra commitments and stress. Make room for work-life balance and cut the useless activities that add no value to your life. You can only find time if you value your health. Whenever you feel overwhelmed, simply your food choices.

Are you tired of following diet plans?

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