How to eat healthy? One of the messiest questions in modern life. With so many competing ideas and strong opinions, it’s enough to drive one mad. When I started health coaching, I struggled to discuss this with clients. It seemed so complex, so nuanced, how could there possibly be a way to speak on this topic confidently with people from all different backgrounds? My goal here will be to take this messy question and get us somewhere clear and actionable.
Take five seconds to think of what comes to mind when you think of healthy food. If someone else is in the room, ask them to do the same. Did you come up with exactly the same answer?
Keeping it simple
If you think that there is one single approach to healthy eating, I invite you to set that notion gently aside. The human body can prosper under very different nutritional conditions. Think about how different the cuisines around the globe are, yet we see very healthy people living everywhere. Olympic champions come from all over. Most approaches to healthy eating are effective if implemented consistently. From my experience, there are only two main actions that all approaches follow: fewer processed foods and portion control. More on those two below. From there, it’s up to us to tailor our eating to an approach we like and feel satisfied with. If we can enjoy our approach to eating, we can achieve results for life.
When wanting to eat healthier, if your first thought involves making dramatic change like strict dieting, I encourage you to ask yourself two questions.
- Do I enjoy and feel satisfied with my food?
- In one year, will I still be able to comfortably keep up with this eating approach? How about five years from now? Ten?
Before we get too far, I think it important to note that I am not a medical doctor. I am writing this article to be widely applicable to people, though some of us get recommendations from medical professionals for our specific situations. If this is you, always prioritize what your medical professional tells you ahead of something you read on the internet.
What’s not helpful
I think it’s unproductive to list out how many servings of what food groups you should be aiming to eat each day because that would assume you’re starting from scratch. If you’re reading this, I’m guessing that you’re a human who already eats food, so let’s start exactly where you are and work from there. Starting from scratch and throwing generalized numbers in your face would be a lazy, one-size-fits-all approach. It can also be discouraging and overwhelming, and that doesn’t do us any good. We can make it easier on ourselves by starting where we are right now and making tiny tweaks as we go forward.
I also think it would be plain ol’ dumb for me to spend time trying to persuade you to eat more vegetables and fewer desserts. If that was effective, none of us would be here. A lot of helping professions take an approach of giving people information in this manner. “I’ll tell you how to fix yourself, charge you too much, then leave you on your own.” Clearly this doesn’t work. It’s in human nature to focus on what’s not working, to “fix”. However, when working on eating healthier, this negativity bias of ours can be more discouraging than helpful.
We want an approach that is encouraging and increases our readiness to change, not one that makes us feel unacceptable. Feeling unacceptable is an uncomfortable feeling and one that we don’t deserve. We don’t need to fix anything. We are human; therefore we are whole, beautiful, and wise. Instead of this mindset of needing to fix something that’s broken, we can have a mindset of outgrowing our current habits to engage more with the life we want for ourselves. We can’t delete our habits because we can’t go back in time. What we can do is build something stronger over the old and let the old fade away automatically. This is how behavior change happens.
Two impactful areas we can focus on
All of us as humans are already whole and wise, and if you’re honest with yourself, you already have some tweaks in mind that you’re considering making, or at least experimenting with. So, let’s skip over all the condescending nonsense that often comes with healthy eating advice and get to the good stuff, shall we?
Above I mentioned a couple universal areas we can focus on.
- Fewer processed foods. No healthy eating approaches will try to get you to eat more processed foods. There are huge companies in our world who hire scientists solely to create the most addictive flavors and textures they possibly can. This makes it incredibly hard for us not to overeat these nutrient-depleted, manufactured products. This is one good reason to not feel like a failure when it’s a struggle to not overeat. It’s what these products have been designed for. It’s hundreds of scientists versus you and that’s not a battle most of us will be able to win, it’s one we have to learn to avoid altogether. There is a strong correlation between greater longevity and consumption of few to no processed foods.
- Portions. No matter what we’re eating, paying attention to how much we dish up is vital for feeling and performing our best. Processed foods also invade and mess with us here in a specific and insidious way. The human body is an excellent survival machine, and we have evolved to secrete a hormone called leptin that tells us when we’re full. A hormone is simply a chemical messenger in the body that provides us with information. You can think of leptin as a mailman, in this case a specific mailman who delivers your brain the message that you have had enough to eat and it’s time to stop. However, processed foods are very new compared to the couple hundred thousand years humans have been around. Leptin has evolved to adapt to make us feel full based on what we were eating back then – very unprocessed plants, meats, gathered seeds and whatnot. Processed foods are designed to leverage this and they can interfere with our secretion of leptin. This means our physical mechanism that usually tells us when to stop simply fails to deliver its message. Processed foods effectively slash our mailman’s tires so he can’t deliver us the message that we’re full, leading us to eat and eat. This is why it’s so easy to overeat foods like potato chips and cake, whereas we would never overeat something like raw broccoli or carrots. It’s a vulnerability that all humans have, and holy cow do food companies shamelessly take advantage of it. They target us all, especially our kids.
Why what’s healthy is slightly different for each of us
Humans are unique. Yes, there are overlaps including the broad areas of processed foods and portions, though the human body can do really well under lots of different eating approaches. We all know that choosing a banana over a scoop of ice cream is the healthier choice, though for comparison questions, there isn’t always a clear answer.
I keep coming back to this point because it’s important to understand; humans are not fresh-off-the-line mechanical machines, we are insanely complex and unique, and therefore, what’s healthiest for us will have some differences from person to person. This is one reason why no health professional, no matter how experienced or well-studied, could tell an individual exactly what they should eat. It’d be nice, but humans are more complex than that. Different factors have different impacts on us.
Once again, take five seconds to think of what comes to mind when you think of healthy eating. I want to emphasize I’m not asking you what you think others or society at large would say – I’m asking you to think solely about yourself, and maybe your family/roommates, here. What factors matter to you when you think of this question?
There are some who think solely in terms of calorie intake. For others, cost may play a role. Think about a college student with a limited budget – grocery shopping must be done efficiently to not get stressed about money. Maybe sustainability is important for you – shopping and eating in a manner that will allow generations after us to be able to live on this planet too. For most, what we enjoy and find pleasure in eating will impact our choices. For some, what our family enjoys and will eat plays a big role. Maybe you exercise a lot and enjoy eating mostly protein. Perhaps you prefer eating mostly fat, or mostly carbs, and these preferences drive your shopping habits. Taste preferences, what’s available to buy, the food items we buy purely out of habit could play a role. Maybe you live part of the year in a tropical region with abundant fruit and veggies, and the other part in an area with less access to fresh produce. No one is wrong, as long as they’re being honest with themselves. I imagine you can add more to this list of factors.
So, we see that the idea that there is one “best” or “healthiest” way to eat is a close-minded perspective. The question of how to eat healthy must be answered on an individual level.
You know what healthy choices look like for yourself more than anyone, even more than experts in nutrition (for more on this, see my article There’s Only One True Expert on your Health). If we take control with this mindset, it can be empowering! We don’t need to surrender control to external sources, we can and should define for ourselves how to eat healthy.
Acceptance is a prerequisite to healthy change
Though you may not be in a current eating habit that you’re perfectly happy with, you are somewhere that’s allowing you to survive, so it’s only upward progress from here. There is nothing inherently wrong with what we’re doing now because we’re human beings who are surviving and living our lives. We can change because we want to, not because we have to. Once we realize this, we can evoke confidence and movement from within.
Eating healthy isn’t about following rules because we are not machines who use a manual to run – yes, I am beating this point into you repeatedly on purpose. We need to find what makes us feel good and gives us the outcomes we want and find a way to eat like this sustainably. Who cares what others do or think? We want outcomes for our individual selves, and we want the results to last, period. This requires experimentation, trial and correction.
It’s also important to point out that with behavior change, it’s glamorous and fun to talk about the change and the success, the results and long-term outcomes. What we don’t often hear is the struggles during the journey, all the trial and corrections, the messiness and frustration over long weeks and months. The sadness with not reaching for your favorite comforting, processed snack cake at night; the difficulty in making a change that doesn’t seem to give you the outcome you want, and the urge to stop putting in the work to change; the effort it takes to find new, healthier foods that you actually enjoy, learning new shopping habits, new recipes, and so on. These difficulties are real, normal, and tough to deal with. Even the smallest of changes to our eating habits can be discouraging, frustrating, and bring lots of ups and downs. I don’t have an answer to help you to avoid these feelings but knowing we’re not alone can help us courageously through. No one avoids the struggle. It’s the price we pay to be able to live the life we want to live.
For those focused on macros
Macronutrients, or macros, are the nutrients that give us calories – carbs, protein, and fat. Lots of diets will aim to tell you the exact grams to eat each day, but this approach has a fatal flaw:
It forgets that we humans don’t eat spoonfuls of nutrients, we eat food! And food is complex, it comes in packages. For example, you could eat a lollipop for carbs that will “packaged” with added sugar, or you could eat a whole grain like oats which comes packaged with nutrients and fiber. Focusing on macro ratios alone doesn’t account for what comes packaged with our macros, which really matters!
Evidence shows that any reasonable ratio of macros can lead to weight loss and healthy living. What matters is the quality of food we’re eating. Instead of trying to perfectly hit an exact ratio day after day, try focusing on eating quality macros:
Protein and fats derived from plants, and unprocessed carbs like whole grains. Unlike processed foods, our bodies won’t overeat these, we’ll fill up and feel satisfied, and the resulting calorie deficit over time is what helps us lose weight.
Great… but what can I actually do right now?
I wrote this article hoping to get deeper into this question of how to eat healthy, provide you with some things to be thoughtful about, and to empower you, though I must admit that some actual steps to get ideas flowing on how to take action always have a place, if it’s something you’re considering. Let’s finish with some.
Research shows that simply paying better attention to what we eat leads to healthier choices and outcomes. When we pay more attention, we often eat less overall, eat fresher foods, more variety which gets us more nutrients, and for these reasons we feel better. Another plus to paying more attention to our food choices is it will likely lead to us being more thoughtful about the other Core areas as well.
- Find a way to pay more attention to your food – often, people find that healthy change comes along automatically with this. Maybe this looks like getting to know people at your local food market, looking to see where your produce is grown, or trying to eat more colors of the rainbow. Find something that’s fun so that you’ll want to keep at it.
- Notice how many processed foods you’re eating. In modern life, so many foods are processed that most of us can’t simply avoid them. However, paying more attention to them and tiny tweaks toward eating fewer processed items can make a big difference in our health over time.
- Notice patterns around how much you put on your plate, how big your plates are, how much you actually eat when snacking throughout the day, etc.
- In clinical health coaching, we focus on strengths, so here’s one more idea. Think about one decision you’ve made in the past week that you’re proud of – ordering veggies instead of pepperoni on your pizza, drinking water instead of another cocktail or soda, having less dessert than normal, anything like this. Now, take five to ten seconds to be proud of that choice. Share it with us in the comments if you’d like. Community can be a powerful form of support. Or, simply pat yourself on the back or give yourself a round of applause – it’s okay to be silly about it, make yourself smile. You deserve it! Finally, consider: how can you build on that win to achieve another small win within this next week?
A sizeable portion of my knowledge of healthy eating comes from a textbook called The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition from Precision Nutrition, written by John Berardi, PhD, CSCS, Ryan Andrews, MS, MA, RD, Brian St. Pierre, MS, RD, CSCS, Krista Scott-Dixon, PhD, Helen Kolias, PhD, CSCS, and Camille DePutter.
Berardi, John, et al. The Essentials of Sport and Exercise Nutrition. 3rd ed., Precision Nutrition, Inc., 2017.
