How to Eat Better by Adding, Not Restricting

A lot of times, our challenges with food come from the battle between the short-term and the long-term goal. In the long term, we want to eat food that’s going to help us with the grander goals we may have—losing excess fat, having more energy, recovering faster, building muscle, reducing heart and other health risks, etc. In the short term, we want cheezburger. Or candy. Or whatever it is that evolving in environments where food is hard to come by has made us desire so strongly.

As such, simply willing yourself to overcome those millions of years of evolution and eat for the long term can be an extraordinarily challenging task. When struggling with eating less or “better” foods in particular, I’ve found that using a simple rule of eating more is one of the easiest ways to overcome the initial hurdle. But not just more of anything, and not just when you feel like it.

Commit to eating a plateful of vegetables every day (or X days a week, depending on your schedule), sometime in the afternoon before you eat dinner. Raw vegetables, no dip. You can sauté or steam them, but the point is that when you start to get hungry, you’re eating these foods that will condition you toward craving them as a snack normally.

Good raw snacking vegetables include (but are not at all limited to): edamame, celery, carrots, tomatoes, snap peas, zucchini, cucumber, bell peppers, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, squash, asparagus.

Change takes conscious effort at first, then becomes routine, then becomes your new normal.