How to start eating healthier? Where to get the motivation?

For people that have never been eating healthy and don’t know the essentials of healthy eating, it can be challenging to start this journey. Changing your eating habits drastically and sticking to these changes especially if you have never been cooking before can be overwhelming too. In this article, we share the healthy eating tips by board-certified physician and best-selling author Dr. Joel Fuhrman.

1. The first tip is getting informed about what eating healthy actually means. Dr. Fuhrman says that namely people who start by reading his book Fast food genocide or other books about the unhealthiness of fast food and how it affects every aspect of your life are likely to implement a sustainable transition to healthy eating habits. You should not perceive healthy eating as a temporary diet. You need to understand that healthy eating is a change/habit that must be followed for the rest of your life for you to stay healthy so to stick with it, you need to get informed about all dangers of unhealthy food, benefits of healthy food, and know the principles on which healthy choices are based.

3. Prepare lunch for all weeks of the day on Sunday. Dr. Fuhrman says that an easy way to stick to a healthy diet is food preparation for several days ahead. First of all, you won’t need to puzzle over what to eat every day. Secondly, you will always have healthy lunch at hand when you are hungry and the risk of being seduced to eat something unhealthy drops significantly. Lunch is the most important meal of the day, your breakfast and dinner should be light, and respectively, they are easier to cook. So your main task is to cook lunch for several days and then you’ll have the basis of your healthy diet.

4. Stick with clean food for a week and your taste buds change. At first, clean and healthy food may seem tasteless because fast food has so many spices and taste enhancers that make you crave for more. But once you allow your taste buds to get cleared of all these taste enhancers, you will be able to enjoy healthy natural food.

5. There are many different tasty healthy recipes. You may think that healthy food means oatmeal for breakfast and salad for lunch and dinner and that’s all. But it’s not true! There are multiple different variations of healthy breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks. You can buy a recipe book, download an app for your phone, or find different YouTube videos with many tasty dish recipes. Weight loss and a healthy diet don’t mean that you will eat plain and boring food.

6. Do not be afraid of cooking. As it was already pointed out, there are multiple healthy recipes. Of course, to eat healthily you need to cook. But you don’t need to start your journey with difficult recipes. If you have never been cooking before, try simple recipes, and then, when you feel ready, you can try something more challenging. Indeed, if you want healthy, tasty, and diversified nutrition, you will have to invest some effort. However, it pays off with multiple benefits – weight loss, curing and prevention of multiple diseases, better mood and mental health, and at the end of the day, you can extend your life.

7. You will feel self-satisfaction. Once you make a lifestyle change and it starts to pay off, besides better appearance and health, you will be rewarded with a tremendous feeling of self-satisfaction. The best things we have in life require work and sustainability. If you get something for granted, you don’t appreciate it as something earned with your own effort and dedication. So do not be afraid of it besides only things that you earn are what sticks with you.

Note: if you have BMI over 27, eating healthy alone may be insufficient to lose weight fast enough to prevent serious health issues, you can also benefit from weight loss medications such as Orlistat that prevent fats absorption. But please consult your doctor first.