Simple Steps to Healthier Eating

You may not be ready to go whole-grain, super-crunchy granola yet, but you can still definitely take steps towards healthier eating. Many of the illnesses common to American have a great deal to do with our nutrition (or rather, malnutrition). Strange as it may seem, it is possible to be 200 pounds overweight and malnourished-the word simply means that what is going into your body is not enough, or not good enough, to keep you healthy. Most of these steps seem to be common sense to some, but unfortunately such sense seems to be no longer all that commonly known.

The first step towards good nutrition is to clear your house of all junk food and stop buying it! You may feel that you "don't eat much" but a Coke a day is enough to keep you from real weight loss, and coupled with a baby-sized order of french fries, you'd have to starve the rest of the day to make up for the fat and calories you just consumed. Junk food, sweet drinks, and soda all provide no nutritive benefit and serve as a sneaky way to add bad fats and calories to your daily tally. They will also do a number on your health, rot your teeth and clog your arteries.

You may have a hard time giving these up, but you will be so much healthier and feel so much better about yourself when you do. You'll know you have "arrived" when you drink soda so rarely that even 8 oz seems to be too much, and too sweet. Also included in the "junk" category are the heavily sweetened cereals that your children love, and most frozen and boxed meals, and of course, fast food. Take a look at the amount of calories, fat, and chemical additives on the boxes next time you go shopping! Do you really want to put that in your body on a regular basis?

Next, learn to eat sitting down (preferably at a table and not in front of the TV!). When you eat on the run, or standing over the sink, or in front of the TV or computer, your body and brain do not register the food as well. You start to forget when you ate last and snack to make up for it. Eating your food sitting at the table at a reasonable pace allows your body to register fullness and allows better digestion than scarfing your food down in a hurry would permit. You are also more likely to take the time to put together a decent meal if you're already planning on taking the time to sit down to eat it.

Which brings us to the next step: learn the basics of food preparation. It is not that hard to cook simple, healthy meals. If you can boil water and use a spatula and frying pan, you can prepare food much better than the stuff you get in the freezer aisle at the grocery store. If you can do nothing else, you can surely make salads of all varieties. Add low-fat cheese or grilled meat for protein and taste if you like. When you grill meat, throw on some vegetables as well. It really is that simple.

When preparing your food, begin to make healthier substitutions for the less healthy ingredients you normally use. Change your oil…from vegetable oil to olive oil. Any time you cook meat or vegetables, you can use olive oil with good results. If you bake, start using whole wheat flour for half the amount required (this makes for excellent, chewy cookies, by the way!). Rather than using 2 cups of refined white sugar, use 1 cup of sugar and 1 cup unsweetened applesauce. Substitute whole-wheat pastas for white pastas.

Use brown rice or wild rice rather than white rice. Buy or make whole wheat breads. When baking bread, add a variety of whole grains, like flax seed, sunflower seed, steel cut oats and cracked wheat, all of which add wonderful texture and flavor as well as provide essential nutrients. Substitute honey for sugar when sweetening items. Substitute water for most sweetened drinks! You need lots of water to maintain good health, and what better way to stay hydrated than with a beverage that has no fat, no calories, and no bizarre chemicals processed into it?

Another important step in eating healthier is to learn to sweeten to taste, rather than buying pre-sweetened goods. If you purchase unsweetened cereal, you cannot match the amount of sugar in the brightly colored "sugar pops", even if you shovel on 3 or 4 spoons full of sugar. Likewise with tea-there's a lot more sugar in pre-sweetened tea than it really takes to make the drink palatable. The benefit of adding sweeteners yourself is that you can gradually begin to cut down the amount of sweetening you add to things, until you need very little.

Buying pre-sweetened foods keeps your body and taste buds addicted to high amounts of sugars. If you drink a lot of juice, add a little water next time, gradually upping the amount of water in proportion to the amount of juice as you adjust to the less sweet taste. In that line, start your children young with juice that is very much watered down. They won't mind-their taste buds haven't been spoiled like yours!

Finally, learn to snack in a healthy manner. There's nothing wrong with snacking, so long as you are not ingesting "garbage foods" all day long. Cheese and whole wheat crackers (not Cheezits!), carrot and celery sticks, apples, grapes, peanut butter, low-fat yogurt, and the like are all wonderful snacks that are easy to prepare and easy to carry with you wherever you go.

Having completed these steps, you will still not be super-crunchy granola, but you'll be a little closer to "crispy" than you were before!