Wondering if your eating habits are healthy? Maybe you already know they're not, so you're trying to improve on them? Then it's time to learn a few things.

Strike A Balance

Here’s a dirty secret: healthy eaters still eat sweets from time to time. It could be cake, maybe some chocolate, or even some gummies. They also eat things like fast food, or pizza sometimes.

Because they know the truth: there is no such thing as “bad” food. Food is just food. It’s what we do with it that matters. If you eat “bad” food, don’t overdo it. Don’t rely on it for every meal, everyday. Eat it sometimes, in moderation. This will feed your body, mind, and soul, and it will certainly make you realize that you don’t need to spend the rest of your life avoiding donuts in order to stay thin.

Drink Plenty of Water

Healthy eaters know that water is your best friend. In fact, many of them carry high-end water bottles, the kind that regulate temperature, so your water stays cold all the time.

And this counts for a lot, because water is super important for the body. It keeps everything moving smoothly. It helps your skin, your hair, even your bowel movements, as gross as that may sound.

As an added bonus, it makes you feel fuller for longer, and it has absolutely no calories, which takes us to the next point.

Don’t Drink Your Calories

Please, do yourself a favor and put down the soda. If you have a serious addiction to it, at least switch to diet for a short period of time, and wean yourself off of that too. It contains chemicals like aspartame that have been known to cause brain cancer.

Drinking your calories is the worst thing you could ever do, because it doesn’t sustain you. Those are empty calories, with no nutritional value. Drinking them means you can’t eat them, and that is always a terrible time later in the day when you feel like you’ve had enough calories for one day, but you’re still hungry!

Everything Is Paired With A Little Green

Healthy eaters know that your plate should be loaded up with vegetables. It should be a full plate, sure, but it should look very “planty.”

Here’s why: you get nutritional value, you get tons of food, and you can still pair it all with lean meats and starchy carbs, without going overboard.

If you load your plate up with things like pasta first, you wind up with more than you should, and that leads to more weight gain. Instead of cutting out the pasta altogether like some unsuccessful dieters do, just load up on the veggies first, and then finish with the pasta.

Load Up On Protein

Carbs aren’t the enemy, like so many people claim. Carbs are used by the body for energy. It’s what helps you get the laundry and household cleaning done. And fats? They’re necessary for the body to support the cells. It keeps you warm, and helps you absorb nutrients.

But protein? It ensures you don’t waste away muscle mass as you’re losing weight. And it keeps you feeling fuller for longer.

That means you should be aiming for all three, especially protein, with every meal. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself still being hungry after a meal. This leads to more snacking, and a misuse of calories that makes you feel guilty, creating a negative relationship with food. It’s a vicious cycle, but one you can avoid.

Listen to Your Body

Only eat when you’re actually hungry. Your body will tell you with its empty stomach feeling. This is when your body is asking you for fuel. Never eat based on the time. It could be… 7PM and therefore dinner time, but unless you’re actually hungry, you can wait a while longer.

Doing so will make the eating experience much more rewarding. Suddenly, you’re giving the body what it needs, when it needs it. You’re not going based on time, a human-constructed element that doesn’t need to be controlling your body anyway!

Stop Fighting Your Nature

This is a big one. Say you love to eat after dinner. You snack a lot after dinner, actually. Well, you’d be doing yourself a great disservice if you ate all your calorie intake during the day, because you thought of it as what you’re supposed to do. You’d find yourself starving at the end of the night, when you’d normally be reaching for some chips or yogurt.

Instead, a healthy habit would be to play to your own natural rhythm. Say you’re always hungry early morning, around noon, dinner time, and then after dinner. That means you’d eat at those times. No other time! If you’re never hungry at noon, wait until you actually are hungry at 3PM to finally eat.

Keep Portion Sized Veggies In The Fridge

This means when you get a red bell pepper, you wash it, cut it up, and place it in a container in the fridge, ready to go. When you’re hungry and need a little snack, you grab that container, and the hummus, and boom, you’ve got a quick snack.

This is always a smart idea because often times when we snack, we want something fast. Something super easy. And when we think of having to cut things up and wash them, it just seems like a hassle. By doing this from the start, and having it ready to go, you’re making the healthy snack option much more enticing later.

Use Small Plates

Small plates make portion control a lot easier. Not only that, they make the food seem abundant. Imagine having a small serving of something, and placing it on a large plate. It seems so sad, you grab more...

Healthy Fats Are Always Available

Again, fats, good fats, are essential for nutrient absorption and warmth. The body needs fat, but not the burger kind… Well, sometimes.

Some healthy fats to always have available are things like olive oil, avocado, peanut butter, cheese, dark chocolate, oily fish, and nuts. Even whole eggs. Enough with the egg white thing, eggs are fine as long as you pair them with healthy proteins and veggies.