Trying to make healthier food choices can be a real struggle. When store shelves are loaded with delicious, brightly packaged junk food, temptation can be overwhelming. If you’re looking for ways to overcome your junk food habit and finally start incorporating more healthy foods into your diet, take a peek below for a few valuable tips.
Read Food Labels
If you haven’t made a practice of reading nutrition facts and ingredient labels, now is the time to start. Before you toss any packaged foods into your grocery basket, make sure you thoroughly read the label on the side of the packaging. Even items that appear healthy often contain ingredients that aren’t good for your body. Sneaky marketing tactics on product packaging can easily convince you a product is healthy, but in reality, those products may contain preservatives, artificial flavours, sweeteners, binders and thickeners that don’t belong in your body. When reading the ingredients list, limit buying food items with more than five ingredients.
Add More Fruits and Veggies
One of the best ways to practice healthier eating habits is to incorporate more fruits and vegetables into your daily meals. Fruits and vegetables contain healthy carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and fibre that nourish your body with the nutrients it needs to thrive. One of the greatest perks of adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet is improved satiety. Because these natural foods are high in fibre, they take longer to digest, keeping you fuller longer and helping to stave off cravings for unhealthy foods. Plus, it’s exceedingly difficult to overeat bulky, fibrous vegetables; the more of them you add to your diet, the less processed junk food you’ll be able to fit in your stomach.
Practice Meal Prep
Taking a couple of hours on the weekend to prepare healthy meals and snacks can really save you in a pinch. When you’re starving and short on time, the tendency is to eat whatever is easiest to grab. Often, that means restaurant takeout or packaged convenience foods – neither of which are great for your body. When you have prepped meals and snacks ready to go and waiting in your refrigerator, you can quickly pack these items to carry you through a jam-packed day. It takes only minutes to wash, chop and store veggies for the week, and fruit naturally comes in its own convenient packaging. If you have extra time, prepare a few healthy lunches for the coming days so you’ll have ready-to-grab healthy meals to take to work. When it comes to dinner, you can quickly toss an entire meal in the slow cooker before work; when you arrive home, you’ll have a nutritious meal just waiting to be eaten!
Incorporating healthier foods into your diet can be a challenge, but once you learn which foods you should and shouldn’t consume, things get easier. When you start filling your plate with whole, nutrient-dense foods, you leave less and less room for junk food in your diet. Start by incorporating small, repeatable changes in your food choices. As you master those changes, build on them by incorporating more of the foods you know belong in your body. Before you know it, you’ll have kicked your junk food habit to the curb!
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