A Simple Trick for Eating Healthier

I believe healthy eating is hard because it’s often in tension with the three other things we typically care about when eating: taste, price, and convenience.

When we’re choosing what to eat, healthy food may not be the tasty, cheap, or convenient option. How can we prevent this tension between healthiness and the other factors we care about?

Another reason healthy eating is hard is that we are normally forced to choose whether to make the healthy choice (or not) over and over again each day. So, even if we resist eating junk five times, we may succumb the 6th time (and eat too much chocolate cake). How we can avoid choice fatigue and being worn down by temptation?

There is a simple trick that sometimes works like magic to solve the problems above:

A. Eat exactly the same breakfast, lunch, and between-meal snacks five days per week.

B. Choose those pre-selected meals and snacks very carefully. They must be (1) healthy, (2) tasty (to you), (3) convenient, (4) within your budget, (5) nutritiously diverse.

Why these five criteria?

(1) If the food is not healthy, it defeats the whole purpose. So be sure to pick your meals and snacks to be things you’re really confident are healthy (which can be trickier than it seems, given how much contradictory information is out there regarding nutrition).

(2) On the other hand, if the foods you choose are not tasty, you’ll be more likely to eventually quit or grow annoyed with the plan.

(3) If the foods are not convenient to make/get/prepare/order/buy, then when something unexpected comes up, you’re stressed or you’re busy, you may well deviate from the plan.

(4) If the food is not within your budget, you’ll be creating an unsustainable drain on your bank account.

(5) And if the meals are not nutritionally diverse, you’ll be exposing yourself to the possibility of nutritional deficiency and increasing the chance that you get tired of what you’re eating. Note that individuals seem to vary considerably in how quickly they get sick of foods.

I find that I get tired of homogenous foods (e.g., baked potatoes) rapidly, but diverse foods (e.g., a standardized salad with the same exact mix of highly diverse ingredients) I can eat for months without getting tired of them.

It’s really hard on a random day to find foods that meet all 5 of the criteria mentioned above, but this simple plan only requires you to do it ONCE and then to apply that template daily.

I find that, since the plan is totally standardized, it’s a lot easier not to experience temptation. It can become pretty automatic, which is what you want. But still, you should avoid keeping tempting foods nearby because they can make it a lot harder to stick to your plan. The key is to minimize having to make tradeoffs or resist tempting foods.

By regimenting your food in this way, it also can be easier to lose weight, (if that’s your goal, because you can vary the calories in your daily plan). It can also make it much easier to make other dietary alterations, such as reducing sugar or becoming vegetarian or vegan.

There are four reasons I recommend having the regimenting stop before dinner and not apply on the weekends:

• If your selected foods are not diverse enough, you may be missing out on something your body could benefit from, and allowing flexibility at dinner and on weekends will increase your food diversity. Food cravings may also help guide you to things your body needs (e.g., if you don’t have enough salt, you may crave it or find it extra delicious) though it’s disputed whether that sort of honed food craving is a real thing (clearly many cravings we have are not because our bodies need that thing; unless our bodies really need ice cream).

• Dinner time and weekends tend to be the most social eating times, so the plan won’t interfere as much socially.

• Food is one of the joys of life, so dinners and weekends will still give you time to explore the variety.

• By allowing variety with dinner and on the weekends, the whole plan will be less annoying, making it easier to stick with.

Of course, you’ll have to practice reasonable moderation at dinner and on weekends to make sure that you really are eating healthier overall. If you have trouble doing that, you may want to standardize even more meals.

Of course, this plan is not ideal for everyone. Some people would surely get sick of a daily regimen, even if it is diverse. Others might find it hard to stick to such a plan due to temptations or might conclude that the novelty of different foods is too important to them; even if the plan only involves breakfast, lunch, and snacks five days a week.

My prediction, however, is that many people would find this approach to be one of the simplest and most effortless ways to eat better.

If a food regimen like this is what you already gravitate to, or if you’ve been on such a plan for a while, then the next question to ask yourself is: can I make my plan even healthier without significantly losing out on cost, convenient or taste? Your future, healthier self will reap the rewards.