Healthy Eating Tips for Weight Loss

When your goal is weight loss healthy eating is always on your mind. Despite knowing what foods you should and should not eat, eating healthy can be a difficult task. Even when armed with healthy eating tips, talking yourself into eating something you don’t like is hard.

{Reinventing the salad is an easy healthy eating tip to adopt!}

Either you don’t like healthy food or it’s too expensive or you don’t know how to cook. Whatever your reasons is for not eating healthy, keep reading to find real healthy eating tips that you can actually use!

Reinvent the Salad

I don’t know how many times I’ve told friends and TFLA readers alike; salad does not have to be lettuce, tomato and cucumbers. While that is the traditional version of the salad, there are many (many!) other vegetable combinations that can be considered a salad.

In fact you can enjoy a salad without any lettuce if you choose. What’s great about salad is that it is, by its very nature, packed with vegetables which are packed with nutrients, which your body needs to be happy, healthy and with less fat!

If the idea of arugula, romaine or spinach makes you roll your eyes and back away from the kitchen, scrap the greens in favor an all-veggie salad. Add tomatoes, radishes, carrots, cucumbers, squash, olives and broccoli and mix with a light vinaigrette for a re-invented salad you might actually eat.

Beans Mean Protein

One of my favorite healthy eating tips is this little rhyme; beans mean protein. What does that mean, exactly?

Well it means that your plate doesn’t have to have meat it on it have protein. Beans are a good source of protein; they’re filling, delicious and filled with fiber! Adding beans is a healthy eating tip we can all use, but especially those of us still shooting for our goal weight.

Black beans for example give you 7.2 grams of protein and provide you with 33% of your recommended daily value of fiber in every ½ cup. With nutrition facts like that, you can make beans your entrée and fill out the meal with vegetables.

Implement this healthy eating tip by skipping the beef or lamb in your favorite chili recipe and instead add black beans, kidney beans or navy beans…or all 3!

The Diet Shuffle

The diet shuffle is a term I came up with when trying to create healthy eating tips for myself. The diet shuffle is the tweaking you need to do to a day of meals in order to enjoy something you really want, like red velvet cake, but know you shouldn’t have.

It works like this: you take a look at the nutrition facts of the food you want to have, let’s stick with red velvet cake since its fresh in my mind. To make this red velvet work in your well-balanced diet you’ll have to find a way to eat the rest of your meals and make them lower in fat, cholesterol and carbs just to make it (mostly) within your recommended daily allowance.

This dance can be complicated, but the good news is that this kind of diet scrutiny will make you think twice about how often you want to do the diet shuffle.

Eat Full Meals

This should be a no-brainer but I still have people writing to me telling me that they’ve lost a ton of weight by eating a 150-calorie snack eight times a day. Although these fad dieters have lost weight, it is unlikely that the weight stayed off for very long.

Make time in your day for at least 3 well-balanced meals. Starving yourself can lead to serious bouts of overeating, which means a lot of calories that you won’t burn in the gym. In addition to not getting enough food, skipping meals means you’ll make unhealthy food choices when your hunger becomes unbearable.

If your body isn’t healthy, losing weight will be that much harder. Without vitamins and nutrients that come from eating you won’t have the energy, strength or focus to work out and pay attention to eating properly.

DIY Desserts

The second best healthy eating tip I’ve ever received was “do it yourself,” when it comes to dessert. Rather than hitting the snack foods aisle at the supermarket and piling my cart high with cheese popcorn, chocolate covered nougats, ice cream and fruit-flavored candy, I now hit up the produce aisle to make my own desserts.

I’m no Betty Crocker for sure, but making your own desserts is one healthy eating tip that everyone could use.

{Individual DIY desserts satisfy a craving while adhering to portion sizes!}

Making your own desserts give you the control over what type of sweetener you use (brown sugar, honey, pureed fruit) and how much of it you use. Choose a few of your favorite fruits (apples and blueberries are my favorites) and make your own cobbler or pie at home. This lets you still have dessert on occasion while controlling how much sugar you use.

Dine Out Smart

This is one of the most difficult healthy eating tips for most people to follow. Dining out, whether because you forgot to do the shopping or simply because you have a reason to celebrate does not mean that you should eat until your belly is about to explode.

Before you laugh consider that a 1999 study found a positive association between consuming restaurant food and an increase in body fat. So even if you don’t gorge when you dine out, there is something inherent in eating out that causes weight gain.

The portion sizes in many restaurants are much larger than any dietician or nutritionist would recommend and many of this food you think is ‘freshly prepared’ has been pre-cooked and frozen. This just means that you’re paying someone else a lot more than the cost of groceries to help you gain weight.

Dining out smart is a healthy eating tip that can make social events less stressful for you and your weight loss efforts. Here are a few healthy eating tips to keep in mind the next time you’re out to eat: