A Healthy Diet Checklist

A healthy eating regime is not that difficult to incorporate into your lifestyle, if you are seeking to lose weight, following a healthy diet will return much better results than a fad diet that will perhaps help you to lose weight at first but overall has no long term potential.

Adopting a healthy eating plan can at first seem difficult, but if taken one step at a time you will soon find that the little things that you do each day become part of your daily routine until you no longer have to try to follow a healthy eating plan it just becomes a normal part of your lifestyle.

If you follow these guidelines you will be training yourself to adopt a healthy balanced diet without having to put in much effort or take on any extra stress and you will feel much better.

Increase your intake of fresh fruit and vegetables – the ideal amount of fruit and vegetables is five portions a day.  This may seem difficult to some but is actually quite achievable.  If you start one week by taking a glass of fresh fruit juice with your breakfast you have just added one of your five a day portions.  The following week you can add a piece of fruit to your lunch menu, which means by the end of week two you are having two of your daily fruit and vegetable requirements with very little effort or adjustment needed.  At the end of five weeks you will find you have achieved your goal of having five portions for fruit and vegetables everyday.

Choose Whole meal – Make the effort to choose whole meal foods whenever you can, if you are eating out for example, choose whole meal bread or pasta instead of what you would regularly have, even if you only do this once or twice a week you are further on your way to gaining a healthier diet.  Set your own goals, for example you may choose to eat whole meal everyday for your lunch from work and still allow yourself your regular food at home.  Your rules will eventually become habits and you may find yourself choosing to eat whole meal at home as well as when you are out.

Reduce your salt intake – Again set yourself a goal for this, if you are the type of person who adds salt to your lunch and dinner everyday, then make a goal for yourself to only allow yourself to have salt at one of these meals, you will be surprised at how easy this will become and if after a while you find you do not need the salt you may even decide to cut it out altogether.

Reduce your sugar intake – many people use sugar every day in our tea and coffee, if you tend to drink a lot of either of these, simply cutting one spoonful or even half a spoonful of sugar from your regular amount will make a huge difference to your diet.

Drink water- start by gradually increasing your intake of water everyday.  Try to bring a small bottle of water to bed with you every night so that when you wake in the morning thirsty, the water is right beside you.  Drink it before you get up, it will help to keep you hydrated and will make you feel refreshed when you do get up.

Cut down on caffeine- Try to limit the amount of tea or coffee you drink, combined with the reduction of sugar you will be greatly improving your diet by doing this.  Limit yourself to one or two cups a day.  

These simple methods will help you to achieve a healthy balanced diet, you do not need to do everything at once, if will be too difficult to adapt to if you try and change your diet in one go, instead take one point and incorporate it into your daily routine and follow it for one week, the following week take on another of the guidelines and so on until you have achieved everything on the list.  These easy steps will help you and you will feel much better in the long term.