3 Awesome Life-Hacks To Make Sure You’re Always Eating Healthy:

Eating healthy is something that everyone strives for but not all of us are able to make an actual reality. Far too often we resort to buying lunch, rather than taking one to work, or ordering takeaway rather than cooking something at home.

According to the information provided in the amazing HelloFresh decision detox, nearly half of all Australians admit that they find deciding on what to make for dinner and budgeting for groceries the most stressful decisions in their day.

There’s no doubt that many people struggle to find the willpower to make consistently healthy dietary choices and often give up simply because they don’t know how to stay motivated. Often people wrongly dismiss healthy eating as forcing themselves to eat foods they don’t like, when there are probably plenty of healthy meals they would enjoy.

Let’s take a look at 3 handy life-hacks you can use to keep yourself eating healthy round-the-clock.

1: Make eating healthy more convenient

The best way to keep eating healthy more often is to simply make the healthy option more convenient than the unhealthy one. This takes some deliberate reshuffling of your lifestyle as more often than not, the unhealthy food choices are always quicker and more readily available.

• Keep a basket or plate of your favourite fruits prominently displayed on your coffee table or kitchen counter. It might be a good idea to place it the entranceway so that you can easily grab a healthy snack when you enter or leave the home.

• Keep a tub of pepper sticks, baby carrots and other snack-worthy vegetables at eye level inside your refrigerator.

• Keep bottles of ice-cold water and pitchers of unsweetened tea for easy drinking access in your fridge. Whenever you’re craving a drink, you have something ice-cold and refreshing right there.

• Deliberately making too much food when you cook healthy dinners so that you always have leftovers. This also helps you save money in the long term.

• Keep a repertoire of quick and healthy recipes on hand so that you can easily make something when you get a random craving.

• Buy a slow cooker. Simply set your ingredients to cook throughout the day and come home to the aroma of a healthy, hearty meal.

2: Make eating healthy more attractive

Once you’ve made eating healthy more convenient, the next step is to train yourself to genuinely enjoy the healthy choices you are making. There are several ways you can trick your brain into enjoying something it otherwise wouldn’t, and the follow tips are examples of how to do that with healthy food.

• Chop up fruits and vegetables before eating them or storing them for later. Your brain finds eating small pieces of fruit and veg more appealing than committing to a large portion. While this step takes more time than just taking a bite out of a raw vegetable, it will undoubtedly make you more likely to eat said vegetable more often.

• Start buying more colourful produce and create a nice visual mix in you meals. Sweet potatoes, squash, peppers, berries and grape tomatoes are all great examples of produce that really makes your meals standout visually.

• Use nutritious and tasty garnishes such as sunflower seeds, toasted nuts, crumbled cheese or even little spicy sauce with your vegetable sides. Mixing brown rice with cranberries and toasted almonds is a great way to make rice both healthier and more exciting.

• Buy elaborate and colourful dinnerware that makes eating home cooked meals more aesthetically pleasing.

3: Make eating healthy normal

The last step in the journey is all about transitioning to a point where making healthy choices is a no-brainer for you. These tips are more like end goals rather than specific strategies as they are a sign that you have truly transformed your eating habits.

• Stock your kitchen with all healthy food and only a few treats here and there. If you make sure that you’re always surrounded by healthy food, then healthy food will become your new normal.

• Form daily healthy eating habits and stick to them. For example you could have a light salad as a dinner appetizer or a banana as a morning snack. Once these behaviours become a part of your everyday routine you’ll forget you’re even doing them and won’t have to spend extra energy just to make a healthy choice.

• When eating out with friends, be the first person to order and be sure to order something healthy. This makes it so that you have set the “norm” for the table, and everyone else will likely not want to pick something more gluttonous than you.

• Throw away all the takeout menus stuck to your fridge or spread around the hallway so that they’re not tempting you anymore. On the rare occasion you decide to reward yourself with takeaway, you probably won’t need a reminder of where to go.