Tips for Improving your Diet, Sustainably
Improving your diet can be hard. Lots of people tend to gravitate towards fad diets, like the paleo diet, Whole 30, the keto diet, Atkins, etc., and all of these diets require you to follow strict rules. But following strict rules is difficult, and in my opinion, it is likely one of the reasons that people have a hard time sticking to them. Say you start the paleo diet. You buy all of the groceries, prepare your recipes and meals, and then you arrive at a work luncheon where the only things being served are pasta salad, potato salad and burgers. So what do you do? The paleo diet doesn’t permit grains of any type. I think at this stage most people just decide to abandon the diet, and they are less likely to stick with it after that experience. Rigidity and strict rules are not conducive to making sustainable changes. What will help you make sustainable change is to create new habits, slowly and steadily, in ways that fit within your lifestyle.
I personally don’t follow any dietary fads. I used to, in fact I’ve probably tried them all. I was so ill for many years and I would have done anything to improve my stomach pains. Ultimately, I learned that it was by following general rules, consistently through positive habits, that I was able to see lasting change.
So let’s talk about habit forming. I’m sure you’ve heard all of the different research about how long it takes to form a habit. My guess is that everyone is different when it comes to how long it takes for a habit to form, but it requires some consistency. James Clear wrote an awesome book called Atomic Habits: Small changes, Remarkable Results. In his book, he discusses different ways to improve your life by making small, sustainable changes. He talks about four ways to encourage healthy habits: (1) make it obvious, (2) make it attractive, (3) make it easy, and (4) make it satisfying. I think these are great tips for encouraging healthy habits with diet, so I’m going to make a few suggestions for how you can incorporate these steps into your routine, and then give some suggestions for small but significant places to start.
Make it obvious: Want to make a healthy meal the obvious choice? I think the best way to make healthy eating obvious is to set up a meal plan for yourself. It should be specific, and clear. For example, instead of just saying “I’m going to eat a better breakfast” you should be saying “here are my breakfast recipes for the week, with the groceries I require.”
Make it attractive: When it comes to food, I think this criteria applies to how it looks, smells, and tastes! So go for food that you love. Make it tasty, and make it beautiful. Appeal to your own tastes as well. I can tell you that kale is healthy all day, but if you hate it, then you won’t sustainable incorporate it into your diet. So, pick a healthy option you love, and run with it.
Make it easy: This is so important. To make healthy eating easy, it’s all about putting in some advance prep. Use your weekends to meal plan and grocery shop (see my post on meal planning on a budget) and then use your evenings or mornings to do things like packing your mid-afternoon snack. Your hangry mid-afternoon self will thank you.
Make it satisfying: Don’t starve yourself. The idea behind healthy eating is that if you’re opting for whole foods that are high in nutrients (and protein, and healthy fats) then you won’t need to over-indulge. Incorporate proteins, healthy fats and whole grains and you shouldn’t need to over-indulge.
Now, habit forming really does require small, consistent changes. So, I suggest that you start by choosing one aspect of your diet that you want to improve, alter it in a way that makes sense to you, and then do your best to stick with that until it becomes self-sustaining (i.e. you don't have to force yourself to do it because it has become natural). It’s one thing to tell you how to improve your habits, but I’d also like to give some suggestions for how to specifically improve certain aspects of your dietary routine. Below are some suggestions for how to improve your morning beverages, breakfast, and daytime snacks, but obviously there are many other categories that you may wish to tackle (like lunches, main meals, exercise, desserts, meditation, cleaning and organization, etc). I’ll do some later posts to address those challenges.
Morning Beverages
Most people start their day with a cup of coffee. It’s warm and soothing, and it gives you a little perk so that you can get going with your day. But I think a lot of people are trying hard to get away from the coffee habit. I personally drank coffee for years, and it was only recently that I realized the havoc that coffee was causing in my body. It seemed as though the coffee would build up in my system over a period of months, and eventually I’d be having shakes, difficulty sleeping, and a sore stomach. I’d cut coffee out for a few weeks, but I’d always gravitate back to it before I had formed a proper coffee-free habit. So if you’re looking to eliminate coffee, here’s what I suggest:
1) Start your morning with warm water and lemon. Do this as soon as you get up. The warm water is soothing, and the lemon is bright and citrus which will give you a little wake-up boost. However, the real benefits to drinking warm lemon water in the morning are that it stimulates your digestive system and helps out your liver. By giving your digestive system a little kick-start, and by helping your liver out a bit, you’ll definitely start to notice some more lasting benefits in your digestion, energy, skin, and mood! If you want to learn all about the benefits of improving your digestion and your liver, chat with a holistic nutritionist, like my personal favourite Kim Banting.
2) Continue your morning with another healthy hot beverage. This is where you can get creative, but you’re trying to form a new habit so you can kick another one, so I suggest finding something you like and then sticking with that thing for a few weeks. I personally like to mix up my hot morning beverages, but you do you. In my “warm beverages” section, you’ll find a few different options. If you’re dependant on coffee then you may want to reduce your consumption slowly, going from a few cups per day to one cup for a week or so, then down to a half-caffeinated cup for a week or so, then one every second day, etc., until you no longer have withdrawal symptoms. Then, start incorporating a healthier option. Find what you like, and enjoy!
Breakfast
How many of you think “I don’t have time for breakfast” or “I only have time for some quick oats or a piece of toast”? Yeah, I hear you. Mornings can be tough. I am NOT a morning person, and incorporating healthy habits into breakfast time has always been a struggle for me. But breakfast really is the most important meal of the day, and eating a healthy, balanced, protein rich breakfast can do wonders for the rest of your day. You’ll feel like you have more stable energy, and you won’t be driven to snack on that bagel or those chips at 10:00 am. Win the morning, win the day. Am I right?
I personally drink smoothies in the morning. I find that it is the easiest and quickest way to incorporate all of my needs into one on-the-go breakfast. The best way to make a morning smoothie a habit is to choose a smoothie that meets all of your needs, and buy the ingredients for one whole week’s worth of smoothies before the work-week starts. That way, everything is at your fingertips and you don’t have an excuse to just grab a breakfast sandwich on the way to the office (fun fact: I bet that trip to the breakfast sandwich place takes more time out of your morning than the smoothie will).
I suggest my Red Velvet smoothie, in the smoothie section. It’s my absolute favorite. It has avocado for protein/energy, strawberries for vitamin C and flavour, kefir for a probiotic boost, and raw cacao powder for that little caffeinated kick in the morning. Plus, you can easily add things like collagen powder, greens, or any other supplement you could want. Even a tablespoon of almond butter is pretty tasty. Just get all of those ingredients on Sunday, and take the 5 minutes to throw it all into a blender and then into your to-go smoothie cup (you don’t need anything fancy, I use a mason jar).
Daytime Snacks
We’ve all been in the office, starving, with nothing to eat as an afternoon snack. Many of us end up going to the local cafeteria or coffee shop and our low blood-sugar drives us towards that croissant or donut. I’ve been there, and I know how hard it is to avoid that. To change this habit, some advance planning is essential.
You can incorporate the prep time for your daytime snack into your Sunday meal prep, your evening-before prep, or your morning-of prep. Whatever works best for your schedule. I tend to make my snacks alongside my breakfast. My lunch is usually pre-packed in the fridge because Marc and I always consider the next day’s lunch when we’re making supper, so lunch is always leftovers. So when I make my smoothie, I also grab a few small containers and throw together a mid-day snack.
My favourite mid-day snack of all time is apple slices with almond butter. The apple is sweet and delicious, and the almond butter provides some protein which provides lasting energy. This one requires only 2 minutes of prep. I typically just wash off an apple and throw it into my lunch bag with a knife (to slice the apple when it’s time to eat, otherwise it will brown) alongside a small container with a tablespoon or two of almond butter. My homemade almond butter is a personal fav.
Another option is some seed crackers (I like the gluten free variety - your grocery’s health food section should have several options) with hummus. You could also do veggie slices with hummus, though slicing veggies does add an extra few minutes of prep time. I like to throw in a few olives as well, just for fun.
This is the snack I’m eating right now - a few homemade oatmeal cookies ( sweetened with coconut sugar) and a few slices of green apple. Just what I need while writing a blog post!
A final option is a homemade energy ball or breakfast cookie. I love baked goods, and I really enjoy packing as much nutrition into my baked goods as possible. I hope to have a few recipes for energy balls and breakfast cookies in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out. These are great alongside a nice cup of herbal tea in the afternoon.
No matter how many ways you want to improve your diet, it really does help to start with one or two things and work from there. Don’t try and change everything at once, or you’ll be overwhelmed and you’ll probably sink back into your old habits pretty quickly.
Remember that if you set a standard of perfection, you’re probably going to fail. But don’t fall off the wagon! Have that morning coffee, or that breakfast sandwich, but then try to go back to your healthy habits the next day. It’s totally cool to enjoy your vices sometimes, as long as they aren’t habits in and of themselves. Good luck!
Check out James Clear’s book “Atomic Habits” on Audible, or you could go to the library and save a tree!
