Eating Healthy can be annoying to a lot of people and they might be thinking, why would I waste my time eating healthy if life doesn’t last that long? Well, those same people are the ones that are unhappy with their self image and are sad and don’t feel productive as they should. Eating salads everyday or going vegan or vegetarian is not the only way to have healthy eating habits. You can still enjoy sweets and candies and cakes, it’s just the small choices and options that a person chooses from. Like instead of going out to eat fast food everyday, you should find some time to pre-cook or prepare meals.

According to the CDC some benefits of eating healthy are:

• Keeps skin, teeth, and eyes healthy
• Supports muscles
• Boosts immunity.
• Strengthens bones.
• Lowers risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and some cancers.
• Supports healthy pregnancies and breastfeeding
• Helps  the digestive system

Eating junk food is of course not good for you but instead of junk food why don’t you eat fruit? And I know what you’re thinking, fruit? Really? But it doesn’t have to be plain fruit. You can put some chocolate (dark chocolate is the healthiest), you can put in yogurt and put some honey on it with some granola. Point is that you don’t have to just stick to plain fruit or just plain healthy food, you can add some flavor or some type of other ingredient to make it more enjoyable for you. If you don’t feel like eating anything sweet then move onto nuts, pistachios, cashews, almonds, peanuts, peanut butter. These are all healthy options and you can even turn them into a milk for cereal or smoothies. 

Smoothies are a quick easy snack, breakfast and even dessert that you can make. No recipes are necessarily needed. The only rule you should put is that when mixing fruits you should keep it in their categories. Meaning Citrus with citrus and more sweets with sweets and adding some sugar or a natural sweetener would ruin the point of a smoothie in the slightest. Drinking water is going to benefit any person in anything because it hydrates you and overall cleans out your body and gives you energy throughout the day. Drinking juice that is not even 100% juice should be illegal.

Although I love my lemonades and passion fruit juices 8/10 times they’re not even hitting 20% real juice. Making your own fruit juice at home is really simple. All you would need is a blender, water, the fruit or fruits, some sugar, a strainer and a container to keep the juice. In a blender fill it up with fruit and put half of it with water then have however much sugar you think you would want to make it more sweet. I usually put about 3 tablespoons more if I think it’s too bland. Then blend it until it is liquid and then add 2 minutes onto that. Next, get the strainer and pour it into the container. The strainer will take out any pulp that the juice has. You can always add more water if you would like it more watered down and same goes for sugar. There are more listings of foods that are better than junk food on Healthline. 

Can eating healthy promote weight loss?

When going into weight loss, dieting is a part of your journey that you would need to take into account. Although people believe that you can not eat any type of junk food or you can not eat unhealthy stuff are wrong. Keeping a food diary that is specific to you is key, you can log and figure out which foods are not helping you lose weight and what foods make you gain it back. Working out and eating healthy go hand to hand but eating less does not mean that you will lose weight faster. As put in Better Health Channel dieting can be dangerous because “When you lose weight too quickly, you lose fat and muscle. Muscle burns kilojoules, but fat doesn’t. So, when you stop dieting and return to your usual habits, your body will burn even fewer calories than before because the relative amount of muscle in your body has decreased and your metabolic rate is slower.” Basically, eating less just backfires on you in the long run and is overall unhealthy for you.

While eating healthy can bring great physical improvements it can also bring mental improvements, like lowering your stress and genuinely being in a better mood. For your mental health you have to be in the mindset where you have to know when to make the right decision and fight temptation. Along with the food options you have to keep in mind the reality of your weight loss. You can try challenges that say you can lose 20 pounds in 6 weeks but you also have to keep in mind that what works for them might not work for you. So when not seeing results do not get discouraged instead log whatever doesn’t work for you and what does. 

Depending on the goal you would like to reach, different meal preps or options can be available to you. Having a personal dietitian can make your situation easier if you are having trouble figuring out what would or what does work best for your body and to help you reach our goal. When cooking, incorporating lots of vegetables or fruits into the recipe can make it the whole lot better.