Have you tried to develop healthier eating habits in the past but have found it difficult to know where to start or how to stick with it long term? Keep reading because this is for you!
Let's talk about developing a healthy eating lifestyle. I’m not talking about diets or fads here. I’m talking about a lifestyle where we view our food, not only as delicious and enjoyable, but also as nutrition and fuel for our bodies. Food supports our health and well being in so many different ways!
It’s important to have a healthy relationship with food. What is your relationship like with food right now? Do you view it as temptation? As bad? A struggle? Or maybe you see it as something very enjoyable but it’s meant to be more than that and your current food choices, though enjoyable at the time, are making you feel terrible later. Food is here to nourish us and give us the energy we need to make it through our day and feel our best. The fun part is, God also made it delicious and enjoyable!
As with any lifestyle change, it’s a journey. A key to being successful with long term lifestyle changes is taking consistent, small steps toward your goal. A big change is hard to make, but little changes add up slowly to create big change for our future! So let’s start off by introducing one new nutritious meal into our week. You may be listening in today and already eat well, and I applaud you for that! If that’s the case, I challenge you to branch out and find new recipes and add them to what you are already doing!
You can use Pinterest, Youtube, google search, whatever you’d like to start researching some new healthy meals you want to try. Try keywords like “healthy, quick” if you don’t have a lot of time in your schedule to cook. Be realistic with your time so that you aren’t setting yourself up for failure. If you are really crunched for time, there are some great health minded subscription boxes out there that can make eating healthy very convenient for you! This can look a lot of different ways depending on your lifestyle and time availability. The important thing though, regardless of the details of how it looks, is that you are making the commitment to eat one healthy meal each week.
Make a list of all the recipes that interest you. How do you know what to look for? Look for recipes with whole ingredients, rather than prepackaged items. Look for meals that have a clean protein like meat, eggs, fish, or beans. Look for a whole grain starch like quinoa, sweet potatoes, brown rice, etc. And look for a variety of different colored veggies in each dish.
Once you’ve made your “interested” list, commit to trying one meal a week. If you like it, add it to a new “Yes” list that you can keep and have again! If you don’t like it, don’t add it to this list and cross it off of your “interested” list. Your “yes” list will slowly start to grow as you try new recipes. This list will become a great resource for you to look at when you are trying to figure out what to eat for dinner in the future! It’s a list of healthy options that you already know you love! And by the way, it doesn’t have to be only dinner. You can try breakfast and lunch recipes too!
As you try more healthy meals and build your list of ones you and your family like, adding another healthy meal or two or three to your week will become easier and easier to do. You’ll find that, within a few weeks, your eating habits are really starting to change and you are making huge progress toward a lifestyle of healthy eating!
In summary:
You want to start your healthy eating journey by committing to just ONE healthy meal a week. Trying to start too big will set you up for failure and mabe already has in the past. You
You are looking for recipes with whole food items always including lots of colorful veggies to assure your new recipes are healthy. You are NOT looking to follow fads or diets.
And you are creating an intentional list of recipes that you and your family enjoy so that you have a list to come back to as you continue your journey toward healthy eating.
What do you think has been your biggest hurdle in the past for creating healthy eating habits? Leave me a comment, I’d love to know!
If you want a head start in your journey to becoming the person God created you to be, I’ve made some printable journal prompt pages that are yours for free! You can click here to download them! Using them each morning will really set your day off right!
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