8 Easy Ways To Eat Healthier This Week
1. Skip the Cream and Sugar
If you are a coffee drinker, each morning you have a choice on what to put in your coffee for flavor. But I challenge you to skip that altogether, or opt for higher quality additives.
Tomorrow morning, skip the powdered creamer (or single-serving half-and-half) and refined sugar that your workplace or favorite coffee shop offers. This is a huge win you can implement quite easily, and should immediately a permanently change you should make to your diet.
To skip the traditional cream and sugar, you have a few healthy options:
- Go for straight black coffee. This might take some getting used to, but depending on the roasting and bean sourcing, plain coffee can be packed with flavor, and you might end up preferring this over the cream and sugar variety.
- Request heavy whipping cream or real half-and-half. Most coffee shops have these options, but your work might not. If your coworkers feel the same way as you, you can put in a join request for one of these options. Then, your workplace can store in the employee lounge or kitchen.
- Bring your own heavy cream to work, and leave it in the fridge. Since you are buying yourself, go for farm-raised or grass-fed if you can, but what you really want is a full-fat cream that comes milk fat. Ideally, it would come without the antibiotics and added hormones. If your work doesn’t have a fridge, you might be able to bring a super tiny mini fridge if you have room at your desk.
You want to “trade up” your cream in order to get more high-quality fat into your diet. In case you didn’t know yet, fat doesn’t make you fat and there is such a thing as good calories versus bad calories.
Another benefit to this is you will forgo the unnecessary insulin spike first thing in the morning, which counterintuitively will cause you to crash hard in the late morning to early afternoon – regardless of what you eat for lunch.
2. Add Protein And Greens To Your Breakfast
Breakfast eaters, lend me your ears! One of the best things you can do for the first meal of the day is make sure it consists of quality protein.
Why?
A protein-rich breakfast is a breakfast that is satiating, helps preserve lean muscle mass, and can help you lose weight (1)(2).
Personally I like eggs, ground sausage or high-quality bacon as a breakfast staple item, but feel free to insert your own favorite breakfast protein here.
Adding dark leafy greens like spinach is also a good idea in the morning, because it is nutrient-rich and high in fiber. Plus, it’s in my book, Foodalytics, as one of the top 25 healthiest foods!
For those of you that subscribe to intermittent fasting, this won’t apply to you. But if you do eat breakfast, make it a high protein, high fiber one.
3. Eat At A Grocery Store
This is a dirty trick that I keep up my sleeve, and only use when I really need it. But if you are just starting out, or struggling to eat healthy, eating a meal at a grocery store can be a huge win for you.
Whole Foods, Lunds and Kowalski’s are just a few examples of major grocery chains around me that have hot food bars with healthy options.
Just don’t procrastinate too far into the night, because some of these delicacies aren’t open all night. Some ending at 8 or 9pm!
What I like about this option is you are not limited to the major chains, as many local grocers offer similar options as well. It’s truly a great alternative if you haven’t taken anything out the night before, or are just too tired to make anything for dinner.
This is probably the ultimate easiest way to eat healthier, as it requires very little effort. Just drive yourself to the grocery store, load up a bowl or plate with some healthy food, and you can usually sit down right there and eat! Honestly, it’s the next best thing to home cooking.
4. Cherry-Pick Local Restaurants
Search around your place of work or home for restaurants offering hearty salads, or meals that include quality meat and vegetables. Do you best to stay away from American foods like burgers, sandwiches, hot dogs, donuts, gyros, and low-quality Asian cuisine; but aside from these inadequate options, go hog wild!
I like salad joints, high-quality Asian or Indian restaurants, Mexican sit downs, and places that offer healthy soups. Food trucks are another option, and yes, you can get some healthy food at Chipotle! My favorite choice here is the burrito bowl.
Once you start to learn which restaurants offer healthy options, go back to them often and look for new recommendations from friends or cowards – to help you expand your repertoire.
I know it’s kind of a weird name, but cherry-picking restaurants after careful experimentation and analysis can really give you some foundational healthy options for any meal.
5. Buy Pre-Made Healthy Meals
All grocery stores have plenty of healthy meal options available to you, you just need to know where to look.
For meals, pre-made salads and frozen dinners are great choices. Frozen dinners can be hit or miss, in terms of quality, so just make sure you pay attention to the ingredients and you should be fine.
Some salads can really get up there in calories, which is great. I’ve had salads that are in the 7- and 800 range from Target. For someone like me that’s targeting 1700-2000 calories per day, depending on my activity levels, this is perfect.
Evol gluten-free mac and cheese is something I’ve purchased numerous times. You can find it in the frozen dinners section of many grocery stores. What I like about it is it’s gluten-free (I’m intolerant), it has a decent amount of calories, few ingredients, and it doesn’t upset my stomach one bit.
6. Smart Grocery Shopping
If you love cooking, are trying to save money, or you just want complete control over your health – smart grocery shopping is the way to go.
What I like to do when grocery shopping is to remain on the outskirts as much as possible. This is a trick I stumbled upon on my own, when I realized that the more you gravitate to the middle of the grocery store, the more processed food becomes.
A few exceptions, of course, apply: things like salsas, teas, spices, and healthy frozen dinner options live here. But really you should be spending most of your time on the outside of the grocery store. Here you will find fresh produce like fruits and vegetables, meats, seafood, nuts and seeds (typically), and dairy and eggs.
This tip alone will give you a huge head start on grocery shopping the smart way.
Once you are “on the edge here,” try to take things to the next level by upping the quality of your choices, going for less sugary options, and seek more all-natural foods.
For example, if you are a yogurt-fanatic, I would encourage you to go after full-fat varieties. While you might have to spend a good 5 minutes looking around for something with high fat and low sugar, they usually are out there. And it’s totally worth it, because they will keep you more full longer, and wreak less havoc on your blood sugar levels.
Online Shopping
Today, you are not limited to just local grocery shopping. With the purchase of Whole Foods, you can buy a lot of groceries online through Amazon. Other stores offer delivery as well.
Another tip: if you are struggling to say no to junk food in person, try shopping online. An added bonus is trying out stores that carry mostly healthy options, like Thrive Market. And if you sign up now, you can get an extra 25% off your first order!
You can buy healthy snack foods like beef jerky online, a convenient way to stock up the pantry. A great snack between meals, or when you are on the go or in a pinch.
It just so happens that I wrote a 4,000+ word guide to buying beef jerky online.
7. Meal Prep For The Week
Healthy meal prep containers with chicken, rice and salad
Meal prepping is a huge concept that can catapult the quality and health of your meals throughout the week.
At a high level, meal prep is simply taking a day during the week – typically Sunday – to cook a full weeks worth of food. This can include lunch, dinner, and even breakfast.
The primary benefits are twofold:
- Eating healthy
- Saving time
Certainly deserving it’s own post, a lot goes into meal prepping, but if you were to cook pre-planned healthy lunches and dinners that you know, like, and understand – there is literally no excuse to not eating healthy. All you have to do is double, triple, quadruple (or more) the recipe and store the food in reusable containers.
There are a few more benefits as well:
- Saving money
- Over-eating prevention
If you are someone that count calories using myfitnesspal or {insert here}, meal-prepping is an incredible way to predict and control your daily caloric intake. This is a great weight loss strategy you can use, while also receiving the other benefits of saving time, money, and eating healthier.
8. Find a Good Healthy Recipe
Sometimes finding the right recipe can bring renewed health inspiration and motivation.
Talk to friends, browse online, or even follow a recipe on one of your favorite TV shows – it doesn’t matter. What really matters is you’re trying something new and spicing up your health life.
If you find a great inspirational recipe that you love, please share below. I would then recommend that you see if you can do meal prep with this recipe – as long as it covers all the major food groups and you will enjoy eating it multiple times per week.
Here are a few recipe ideas I recommend that you check out:
- Sockeye Salmon – Glazed with Garlic, Honey and Ginger
- Sesame Chicken
- Tri-Tip Roast (Beef Bottom Sirloin) – with Garlic and Herb
