You know you should a healthier diet, but putting that knowledge into action is not always easy. Understanding what a healthy diet means can be a challenge. Food manufacturers, health experts and 24-hour news channels seem to make new claims every day about the best way to eat healthy. When it comes down to it, healthy eating does not require complex calculations, food logging or nutrient combining ... it follows a few basic, logical principles.
Food Choices
A healthy diet includes a variety of foods from multiple food groups. Fresh fruits and vegetables, especially very colorful types, should feature prominently. Accent your produce with whole grains, low- or non-fat dairy, fish, chicken, beans, nuts, seeds and plant oils. Eat red meat and whole eggs in moderation. When you do eat red meat, choose very lean cuts such as sirloin or 90 percent lean ground beef. Healthy eating also emphasizes whole foods over processed products, which often contain added sugars, salt and saturated or trans fats.
Cooking
Focusing on specific cooking techniques supports a healthy diet. For meats and vegetables, methods such as roasting, poaching, steaming, grilling and broiling require the addition of little or no added fat. For breaded items, opt for whole-grain bread crumbs and bake, rather than fry, the foods. Flavor foods with spices, herbs and citrus rather than adding butter and generous amounts of salt.
Considerations
Healthy eating is also about moderating portion sizes. Eating too much food is a major contributor to weight gain, and being overweight puts you at risk for a number of health problems. Examples of typical recommended portion sizes for foods include 4 oz. of meat, fish or chicken, 1/2 to 1 cup of grains, cereal or pasta, 1 cup of milk or dairy, fruit the size of a baseball and bread slices the size of a cassette tape. Use an online calculator, such as the U.S.D.A.'s MyPyramid Plan, to figure out how many daily servings of these healthy foods can help support your weight.
Strategies
If your diet consists largely of processed foods and take-out, it may be overwhelming to make drastic changes all at once. Instead, make small changes weekly -- representing a gradual shift to healthier eating. For example, for two weeks, add a serving of fresh fruit at breakfast. Once that habit sticks, try substituting whole-grain bread for white for a few weeks. Other small strategies to introduce: include fresh vegetables with lunch; cut back on sugared drink consumption; switch to low- or non-fat dairy products; and use olive or canola oil in lieu of butter and margarine. Continue to make small changes and over the course of a year, you will be following a diet that is much healthier, and better, for you.
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