Top Tips for Healthy Eating: How to Shop, Cook, and Create Favorite Recipes With Ease
Eating nutritious whole foods is the foundation for healthy living, happy hormones, and good gut health.
There is a glut of information available today on nutrition advice, and much of it is contradictory, so it can be a challenge to figure out the right way of eating for you.
We are all unique and have different dietary needs based upon our age, stage of life, activities, and health condition.
Yet, there are a few simple techniques that everyone can use to eat healthier and feel better.
#1: Make Your Own Food
You can optimize your nutrition and health, as well as avoid unhealthy additives but minimizing eating out as much as possible.
Cooking your own food at home helps to know exactly what's in your meal, eat more simple dishes that are easier on the digestion, and have higher quality ingredients for a lot less in cost.
#2: Know Before You Go
Create a meal plan and a shopping list before going to the grocery store. This helps you to know exactly what ingredients you need before wandering around the labyrinth of aisles, bright lights, and pretty packaging. Having a list and a plan will help you to have what you need when you go to cook dinner and prevent those impulse buys that are unnecessary.
#3: Shop the Perimeter
Focus your shopping on the perimeter of the store. That's where you find the fresh produce and can stock up on vegetables, fruits, and herbs. You'll also find your fresh dairy, meats, and seafood here, as well as often the bulk section. Also, you'll often find higher quality bread in the bakery area than in the bread aisle. I've found that most of the bread in the bread aisle has soy and sugar added to them (even the organics), but in the bakery section I can get simple organic fresh-baked bread without additives.
#4: Read Cookbooks
Cookbooks are one of the best-selling genres in the book publishing world today, and because of that they are extraordinarily diverse, colorful, and beautiful today. Browsing through a new cookbook will inspire you with new recipes to try and can make cooking fun! Check out your local library for inspiring cookbooks. There are also tons of recipes online to inspire you, but I do find that reading cookbooks (often with sticky notes in hand to mark off the recipes I want to try), really exposes me to new ideas that I wouldn't necessarily see in an internet search.
#5: Save Your Recipes
Keep track of your favorite recipes, because that way you can share them with other members of your household to take turns making dinner, and you can save time trying to search through the internet, cookbooks, or notes for that delicious recipe you made a few months ago. Over the years, I've tried many different ways of saving my recipes, from binders to notebooks to digital files, and I'm really excited about my new favorite recipe recording system which is to use the free app Trello! Trello syncs between your devices and computer online and you can create boards and lists. I have a board that is titled Recipes, and then have lists for different kinds of recipes, like Breakfast, Desserts, or Instant Pot. In each entry I have the title in my list, then open it up and add the recipe to the description and a photo which makes it great for my kids to browse through as well as me.
I hope these healthy eating tips inspire you!
Many blessings,
