Avoid another year of excuses: Automate a Better Diet
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Eating healthy does not have to be complicated. With a little planning and the use of new technology, you can improve your diet for good and put it on auto-pilot. Take the guess work out of it and remove the need to make so many decisions on a daily basis. Like most systems, it involves some work upfront. But you will be rewarded when it takes you a lot less work to stay on a healthy diet permanently.
Create a Meal Plan
The easiest way to eat healthy is plan for it. We all know the temptations to eat something easy for dinner when we get home and have no plan. If you sit down and plan out your meals for the week or month, it will be so much easier to follow.
Taking the time to make these decisions in advance will relieve a lot of the emotional stress of improving your diet as well. It is much clearer now that will power is a daily reserve that you are continually using to make decisions. This generally means that later in the day, after making numerous choices that required various levels of will power, it will be harder to stick to long term goals. Those short term pleasures will be easier to choose. A meal plan makes it easier to stay on the long term path.
Use Technology To Stay On Pace
There’s so many ways that new technology can be leveraged to make a healthy diet simple. There are apps and websites to help create and manage your meal plans from anywhere. There are devices and tools that make it easier to create lots of different great foods, meals and shakes.
Let’s start with the apps. We’ve covered PlanToEat and PepperPlate before, but they are worth mentioning again. They are incredibly useful tools to create and follow a meal plan. They even make it easier to shop by creating itemized lists of the ingredients for the meals you’ve selected. Both apps can be used on their site or on your phone and everything syncs up.
You can also use technology to cook healthier versions of your favorite foods. Great tools like spiralizers, food steamers, juicers and blenders will allow you to create a diverse assortment of healthy meals. A great spiralizer gives you the ability to make so many healthy spaghettis out of your favorite vegetables, like sweet potatoes and zucchini. Here’s a list spiralizer recipes for delicious all-natural meals to help you get started with a spiralizer.
There are even many options to order healthy prepared meals that you can simply heat up and eat. This would certainly be putting your healthy diet on auto-pilot, but a little bit of effort on learning to cook healthy foods for yourself goes a long way.
Cook in Bulk
To make a truly lasting change to your diet, you will mostly likely have to dust of your chef hat. It is not reasonable or affordable for most of us to order all of our meals from a provider that delivers healthy food. You’ll have to start experimenting with healthy recipes and combinations of your favorite foods, but you can prepare your weekly meals in bulk with a little advance planning.
Cook a week’s worth of food in one session and put them into portions for each day that you keep in the refrigerator or freezer. You can easily make enough sweet potato pasta while grilling or baking some chicken and fish to last a week. By condensing most of your cooking into one block of time a week, you will make a huge stride towards always eating healthy meals. Even if you start with just cooking your dinners so that you eat one healthy meal a day, you will be moving in the right direction.
Taking the time to cook more of your own meals will put you on a healthier path. At first glance, this probably does not seem like it is automating your improved diet, and there would be no denying that cooking good meals takes time. But understanding and managing all the foods you consume is the only true way to making lasting improvements and creating systems that will allow you to eat a variety of healthy meals without having to tap in your will power reserve so often.
Eat Less Sugar
More and more evidence points to the fact that we eat way too much sugar in America and many other parts of the world. It’s added to so many drinks and processed foods now that it can be tough to avoid. Just make sure you understand the high cost of not paying attention to the amount of sugar you consume. Eating too much sugar is directly linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a host of other illnesses.
It’s not as easy as just looking for sugar on the label. Now, you have to look for all the hidden sugars in food. MD Anderson Cancer Center’s website lists these popular offenders that you find in many processed foods:
- Fructuse (natural sugar from fruits)
- Lactose (natural sugar from milk)
- Sucrose (made from fructose and glucose)
- Maltose (sugar from grains)
- Glucose (simple sugar)
- Dextrose (form of glucose)
MD Anderson does say that sugar is part of a healthy diet. You should just look for natural sources, like honey, agave nectar, molasses or even maple syrup. Preparing more of your own meals will also allow you to get better control on the level of sugar in your diet. Keep in mind, you can still easily overdo it with these natural sources of sugar. And they should still be used sparingly, too.
One of the best ways to eat less sugar is to significantly cut down on sugary drinks. The amount of sugar in energy drinks, sodas and most chain-store coffee is the most common source of toxic-levels of sugar in your diet. Many people wonder how they will get through the day without that caffeine and sugar buzz to keep them awake and alert.
Did you know that Moringa Powder and Moringa Tea are the perfect addition to your morning and early afternoon routine for an all-natural energy boost. They provide an abundance of iron (nearly 3x that of spinach) to help the body deliver oxygen through the blood to all the tissues and organs. You enjoy of host of other benefits by switching to moringa tea and powder for your morning pick me up and you probably won’t miss the caffeine crash.
Put That Junk Food Behind The Healthy Snacks
Even if you can’t bring yourself to throw out all the junk food in your pantry, you could use it as a reward for you and your family going a week on the meal plan. There’s nothing wrong with an occasional cheat day. You may find that those sugary, processed foods do not taste as good as they once did, and you will probably notice the difference in your energy level.
It will help you stay on the path to an improved diet if you are honest with yourself about junk food. If you love ice cream and candy bars, you probably always will. The evidence from a recent study does suggest that by simply cutting back on the amount of sugar you eat, that you will be lowering the amount of sugar you need to enjoy it. Your body develops a natural tolerance to sugar, and you continue to need more and more to really taste it in your food.
The simple way to break that vicious cycle is by making the choice for healthy snacks more often. You don’t have to give ups snacks to improve your diet. You don’t even have to give up your favorite junk food completely. You just need to make the choice for healthy snacks more frequently.
In fact, you should snack regularly. It will help strengthen your resolve to only eat healthy meals. You won’t be making the choice about lunch and dinner on an empty stomach. The easiest way to do that is to give yourself healthy snack options to add into your meal plan. Have a selection of fruits, berries, nuts and even healthy sweets, like dark chocolate, available at your house and work, and plan out what days you’ll enjoy what snacks.
There are even online services, like NatureBox, that will send you weekly or monthly shipments with an assortment of healthy snacks. Most of these same options can be found in local farmer’s markets and health food stores. The key is to provide yourself healthy options that you can structure into your meal plan, so you can avoid those situations where you are tempted to scarf down that candy bar or cookie. Make the candy bar or cookie a reward for a good week or month and you will have made a lasting change to improve your diet in 2016.