The Cooking Healthy Series For
A Healthier Lifestyle
Healthy Cooking Lesson #4 : How to Make A Healthy Eating Plan
In the last lesson we talked about some low fat cooking tips. In this lesson we are going to talk about how to make the transition to eating and cooking healthier food by making a healthy eating plan.
Making the transition to eating healthier with whole foods is one of the best decisions you can make yourself and your family. However, it can be hard to know where to start. You might be concerned about how you’re going to feed your family this way, and how they will feel about it. You might have cost concerns, or children who are picky eaters.
What’s more, you may not even be sure what foods are really healthy or which ones that are deceptively disguised as healthy. You also have to decide whether you want to switch gradually or throw everything out and start over. Let’s go over a few tips that can help you on your way to transitioning into a healthful diet.
1- Do your research
First, it pays to take a little time to research. Look for consistencies in food information – this will help you avoid “fad diets.” Find out what really makes a food healthy, and decide what food groups you are going to keep or discard. Some people decide not to include dairy in their diets, for example, or they will lean toward a “primitive” diet that does not include processed grains. Essentially, you will be creating your personal healthy eating meal plan using whole foods. To make this easy for you, you can find a FREE whole foods report and a FREE whole foods shopping list that are in PDF format and downloadable to any device. This is available to you free at MunchForWellness.com (find the link in the description below).
2- Make a healthy eating meal plan
Once you are comfortable with what constitutes a healthy food, you can make a chart. This can be so helpful in making out grocery lists and planning meals, and in making the transition in general. To make the chart, you will need two basic columns. If you are concerned with other aspects of your diet, such as glyceemic index and nutritive value, then you might want more columns.
On one side of the chart are the foods you normally eat. On the other side, put a replacement. For instance, you might have doughnuts on one side; you can put whole wheat cinnamon toast on the other side as a replacement.
If you aren’t sure what to replace with a healthier alternative, a good rule of thumb is to replace white with brown, artificial with natural, and processed for whole. For instance, traditional pasta can be replaced with whole grain pasta; fruit snacks can be replaced with natural dried fruit; and potato chips with organic snacks.
3 – Go slowly.
Health experts agree that when switching to a healthier meal plan, you’ll want to make the transition gradually because is less shocking to your system.
You should always remember that restricting food in any way is always a bad thing. Healthy eating is a way of life, something that you can do to enhance your body or your lifestyle. If you’ve thought about making your life better, healthy eating is just the place to start. You’ll make life easier for yourself, those around you, and even your family.
4 – Eat more of the good stuff.
You’ll also want to increase the amount of food you eat. While this may sound like a bad idea, it really does help with the transition.
If you load up on healthy food, you may simply not want the unhealthy stuff. Making a point of eating lots of high-quality, whole foods will theoretically leave less room for the bad stuff – and this is true for your grocery budget as well. Some people have found that this makes for an easier transition than cutting out unhealthy foods and feeling deprived.
In the next lesson, we will be talking about taking a cooking class to help improve your skills.
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The Healthy Meal Prep Cookbook
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