Choosing to Eat Healthy Foods

Some people argue that the key to controlling your weight and eating healthy foods is simply choosing the correct magazine diet plan; Atkins, South Beach, low fat, high carb, low GI and so on. Then you stick to that for the rest of your life. That may or may not actually make you live longer – but it will certainly feel like it.
This alone will make you feel better – empowered and in control

The real key to eating healthily is much simpler than that. The real key is to make informed choices about what you eat and drink and to make good decisions every time you are faced with a choice over what to consume.

After a few weeks of practicing these choices will start to become habitual and intuitive – you won’t even have to think about them to stand an excellent chance of making very good decisions for yourself. They will simply become part of your daily life.

What are these choices about healthy eating?

There are two you will face over and over:

• What should I choose to eat and drink?
• How much should I consume?

By acknowledging to yourself that you have these choices at each opportunity to consume food and drink you accept responsibility for your decisions and the possible consequences. This alone will make you feel better – empowered and in control.

Of course adopting this approach will not automatically make you eat healthy foods or lose weight (if that is your goal). You may, after all, decide to choose chocolate and then choose to finish off a whole family sized bar yourself! But it will have been your choice, not the manufacturer’s for making it, not the advertiser’s for promoting it, not the shop keeper’s for stocking it, not the person who brought the food into your home. Yours alone...

And then you will find that taking control of these simple decisions and accepting responsibility for the consequences, good or bad, will help you start to change the choices you make. You will be more likely to choose foods which align with your own goals. You will find that you eat portions that more closely match your needs. You have taken control again.

Other parts of this section will explore in more depth some of the most common choices we face day by day. Please read on towards a genuinely healthy eating diet.