Eat Healthy

6 reasons eating healthy is easier than you think

The basic goal is to eat more whole foods and less processed ones. A year later, this former boxed-mac-and-cheese junkie now makes all her meals with fresh ingredients from scratch. Why? It improved my health, and the food actually tasted better.

But more importantly, making and eating clean foods was easy. The rules aren’t complicated. The recipes don’t require fussy ingredients. By planning ahead, I learned to quickly prepare meals. By keeping things basic, I ditched complex guidelines and focused instead on eating real, fresh food.

Reason #1:

You’ll enjoy your food even more. Picture trying to eat a greasy, fast-food burger and fries in your car. Now picture spearing a forkful of salad from your own fridge.

Which one takes longer and really makes you slow down? You got it – the salad. Eating clean also means eating with purpose and savoring food. That means a better relationship with everything from radishes and radicchio to red velvet cupcakes (which you’ll no longer crave of course).

You’ll save money.Goodbye medical bills and sick days. When you get nutrients from eating clean, real food, you are getting the vitamins and supplements you really need without the deleterious effects on your cardiovascular system, and without increasing the risk of obesity related illness and diabetes.

Plus, shopping locally and in season makes sense. Planning clean meals for the week is cost-effective if you make a list and stick to it, as there’s no chance of overspending at the store.

And by skipping pricey restaurants and unhealthy takeout orders, you’re doing your wallet, not just your waistline, a favor. Want to really stretch your clean-eating dollars? Take leftovers for lunch.

You’ll live longer.Picture the fountain of youth made out of whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Study after study has shown that consuming these foods can lengthen your life span.

In a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, European researchers have found that increasing your produce intake to more than 569 grams per day reduces your risk of mortality by 10%.

Choose raw veggies whenever you can; in the same study, they were associated with a drop in mortality of 16%.

Reason #2:

You need a good market.

When I say “market”, I mean a place where you can buy affordable, fresh, whole food. Of course, if you’re on a budget, this market would offer non-organic, non-special, non-biodynamic fresh food…like Haymarket, where I shopped.

Plenty of countries celebrate this market concept as there’s a reserved word for it all over the world: For example, in Germany, it’s ‘wochenmarkt’; in Poland, it’s ‘rynek’; in Thailand, ‘talat’.

Of course, in the absence of that sort of market, you’d have to shop at a supermarket (which sells traditional grocery store or market products, plus household products) or a hypermarket (which is a supermarket, plus a department store). In both cases, you pay more for the convenience of having everything you could need in one location.

Since I live in Boston, I have access to every type of market. But, what if you had access to none of the above?

Yeah, that happens. In fact, health research has recently been focusing a lot on what happens in communities where there aren’t just reduced options for buying fresh food, but none.

These locations are referred to as food deserts, neighborhoods or local areas that combine a) economic disadvantage with b) lack of access to regularly priced fresh food. And the research on them is pretty clear: Overweight and obesity is associated with lack of fresh food access.

So let’s get real: For many communities, the idea that “eating healthy isn’t that hard” is total rubbish. Research suggests it’s hard indeed.

But that’s just one reason why eating healthy is hard. Because even if you have access…

Reason #3:

Make “healthy” the only option.


That’s as easy as it gets. When eating junk is simply not an option, then the path is paved. The problem is the mind. The body wants clean fuel. Eating clean food likely will eradicate nearly every “issue” you physically suffer from, but the mind desperately latches onto the way you’ve always eaten. Listening to your body isn’t as easy as it sounds. It requires willpower and redefinition of what food’s role actually is in your life. Food is fuel. It’s beautiful to be able to make it delicious and enjoyable, yes, but at the core, it is gas in the tank.

You can have the best of both worlds, though! Clean, scrumptious sustenance that has an energizing, anti-aging, detoxifying, satisfying and palpably beneficial effect on the body exists. Get into the kitchen, get food on your hands and find out which healthy combinations make you tick.

Reason #4:

You’ll help the planet survive.Food travels approximately 1,500 miles from farmer to consumer in the United States. By eating local and seasonal foods, you can help reduce your carbon footprint. Want to make an even greater impact? Use glass instead of single-use plastic!

You’ll be stronger.The lean protein that comprises part of the clean-eating philosophy builds lean muscle mass and boosts metabolism, found a study presented at The Obesity Society’s annual meeting in 2014.

Some good choices for your muscles (in addition to animal-based products like chicken, fish and lean beef) include quinoa, chickpeas, nuts, spinach and seeds.

Reason #5:

You need time to cook.

After gleefully buying half the market and then suffering the indignity of not being able to get myself home, I began the more strenuous, boring, and involved task of turning those foodstuffs into food.

If everything is fresh, then most of it needs to be cooked or preserved quickly.

The tomatoes were wonderful and super-ripe, so they needed to be oven-roasted and stored. The okra didn’t like the bag it was in, so we had to cook it the first night. And we sure ate a lot of fruit in the first few days. Ripe fruit doesn’t keep!

I pickled jalapeno chillies in vinegar, and dressed and froze layers of berries. Ginger, by the way, stores remarkably well peeled, sliced, placed in vodka and refrigerated. And it turns out plantains keep forever.

Reason #6

You need cooking skills.

Here’s a fun game you can play. And by fun, I mean really quite depressing.

Find a Millennial, and take away their smartphone (don’t worry, it’s only temporary). Now that they can’t Google the answer, ask them: “What is ‘home economics’?” Often, they don’t know.

In case you don’t know the meaning of “home economics”: It’s a subject they used to teach at school where you learn to manage a household. And while that means you learn to parcel up your garbage and wipe down a countertop, it’s a course mostly about learning to cook.

Yes, that was a real thing. But it’s not anymore.

We are now at least two generations removed from people who grew up in a house where people cooked regularly, and where people were taught to cook at school.

These skills are passed on and socially reinforced. In other words, if you’re just ordinary at cooking, chances are your kids will be even worse.

Recently, there has been some good evidence to show that teaching people to cook can improve ALL of the following: 
– Attitude toward food and cooking 
– Confidence 
– Fruit and vegetable intake 
– Food purchasing habits 
– Social interaction at home 

In the end, it takes some experience and skill to chop up a bunch of foodstuffs and put them together without it tasting awful. Especially if you’re trying to eat on a budget.

Without that skill, the idea that “eating healthy is easy” feels extra absurd.