Healthy eating tips (Road to healthy part 9)

Hello :)

Today I felt like writing about some tips and tricks to help start and maintain a healthier lifestyle. I have been trying to take steps towards being healthier myself and I know it's not always easy and sometimes I feel like I'm not doing well enough or not reaching my goals, so I figured it would be helpful to others as well as myself to write down some things that have inspired me to keep improving myself.

There are a lot of different sides to health, but on a larger scale they divide into mental and physical health, I've talked about them briefly before and as I've said they're both very important and one depends on the other, so it's vital to take care of both. 

Today I'm mainly going to talk about healthy eating tips, since I feel the menatl health part is a lot more complex and would require someone more knowledgeable. Anyway lets get to it.

1. One thing I do try to do is to buy healthier snacks. My main meals tend to be all rather healthy, I don't eat fast food or deepfry my meals, but when it gets to snacks then I love some chocolate, chips, ice cream or things along those lines. I still allow myself those things, but I try to also buy some healthier things to snack on, like fruit and berries for example. I still have room for improvement in this area, but I do feel like it has gotten better.
2. Another thing I've been attempting to do is changing my point of view when it comes to eating. Instead of thinking, that I can't have something I try to think that I choose not to have it, but if I want to, then it's not forbidden to me. I feel like that way I don't feel like I can never eat my favourite foods/snacks again, but instead I choose to have something healthier.
3. One important thing to think about when embracing a new healthier lifestyle is to actually educate yourself. There is so much information online about how you should eat, that it could make anyone a bit dizzy, so I personally decided that a safe bet would be to follow the Estonian eating recommendations, when it comes to my macros and just try to get as much healthy food in as possible. And by healthy food I mean food that would give me most nutrition and also help decrease the amount of inflammation in the body. What each person chooses as their guidlines is up to them, but I feel like the recommendations that I follow are realistic and sustainable, so I give my best to follow them.
4. I knew this already before, but I'd just like to point it out to others, who might not know, but calories are not everything. Just because something has a lot of caloreis doesn't mean it's unhealthy, or the other way around. It's much more about what these calories give you and where they come from.
5. Related to the previous point, weightloss isn't everything either, there's a chance that you'll lose weight when you embark on a healthy lifestyle, but you might not, you might even gain weight, if you've caused metabolic damage to your body from different fad diets or if your previous weight simply wasn't ideal for you. There is no one certain number on the scale that would suit everyone, even if two people are at the same height and gender then their ideal weight could be completly different. Judge more about how you feel rather than what you weigh, because the range that is considered normal is rather wide. If you really want to change the way your body looks, then at least I think working out and toning your body would be a lot more effective, than trying to reach a particular number on the scale.
6. Some people find it useful to check their nutrient intake via an app or a web site, I used to do it, but it's rather timeconsuming and not completly accurate, however, I do recommend it when you're starting off, because you have to make sure that you're eating enough and that your macros are more or less in the correct range. I found it very useful.
7. I definitely recommend to start off easy, it's difficult to make changes and maintain them, if you get into them too fast, it's a bit of a shock to the system, so take one step at a time and eventually you'll see that isn't that difficult to be healthier. Constatntly improve yourself and educate yourself, ask help if you need to, there's no shame in that.
8. The last thing I want to point out is to always maintain a balance, there's a risk to get too involved in healthy eating that you forget to give yourself a brake. The world isn't black and white and neither is our food, there aren't good foods and bad foods, just things we should eat more of and things we should less of, but in the end it's ok to have some chocolate at the end of the day or spread a bit of nutella over your toast in the morning as long as you still maintain a balance.

That's it for today, I might write some more tips in the future, but at the moment I can't think of any more. Hope you enjoyed and if you have some great healthy eating tips, then you can always leave them in the comments.

Kaiela :)