Eating healthy can mean different things to people. If you change or stop one bad habit and replace it with a good habit of eating it is safe to say you started eating healthier. If you have a complete eating make over and change all of your habits into healthy habits it still has the same meaning of eating healthier. The concept of eating healthy is the idea of making healthier choices of your daily foods to improve your health. Eating healthy means removing processed, refined sugars, fast and unhealthy junk food found throughout the grocery aisles and on every other block in different fast food restaurant chains. To eat healthy you should choose foods with less ingredients. These tend to be healthier foods that are whole fruits and vegetables, lean animal proteins, seafood, and vegetarian proteins like tempeh and tofu.

Overall, eating healthy takes practice, preparation, and most importantly a good discipline practice. Many people have tried and failed at eating clean and it's because they are caving into their food cravings. Food cravings come after your blood sugar drops and you feel hungry. This feeling is normal when it's time to eat because your body is communicating with you. Since the body uses carbohydrates as its main energy source it needs to be replenished every 2-3 hours to allow body to burn efficient energy all day. If they body does not get the right foods with the right amounts you are constantly going through a viscous cycle of spiking and dropping your blood sugar, feeding into cravings that lead to over eating the wrong foods. When designing your nutrition goals it’s important to be realistic. Don’t try removing all bad foods with clean/healthy foods at once…you are setting yourself up for failure. Start small and just remove a couple of things each week. Keep a journal of what you are eating and log your food. You will be amazed at what you put in your body once you see it on paper or logged on your app of choice. I like the Lose It app. It's free and you can join your community of friends to see how they are doing with their nutrition goals. It helps calculate the number of calories you can eat to meet your weight loss/gain goal and there is even a premium account if you want to get detailed with your macros and goals.

Remember, daily practices of eating healthy take time to become long term practice. As you develop these changes you will feel and see a difference that motivates you to stick to your changes. As we all know change is hard but the final outcome is well worth the new changes.