The 3 most important things to healthy eating according to a nutritionist

I asked a nutritionist, who happens to be my brother 😜 : “If you could give only 3 tips for eating healthy, what would they be?”.

Here’s what he replied:

1) Choose high-quality raw materials

The raw material you pick for your plates should be the least processed as possible.

A good rule of thumb is to avoid buying food which contains more than five ingredients. Also, if you have no idea of what an ingredient on the label is, this may be a red flag!

For everything you eat, from fruit and vegetables to animal and vegetable protein sources, from seasoning like olive oil to wine, it would be great to know where they come from.

If you can buy local, that would be great! The product is likely to be more fresh than if it came from another country or even continent, AND you’ll do a favor to our planet, as local products do not generate pollution to be transported by ship or plane.

It’s important to get to know whether/how fruit and vegetables are treated. For instance, when you buy organic food you know there are no pesticides on the outside of the product.

If you get the meat from a local butcher, you can make an educated guess that it will be very different (in positive!) from intensive farming meat. And same goes for fish. For instance, animals that are grown in confined, overcrowded spaces are given antibiotics to prevent infections: these antibiotics are then ingested by the consumer, who can develop antibiotic resistance (to name just one negative effect).

At the end of the day, the secret is choosing high-quality ingredients.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be more expensive. Actually, you can even save money if you invest a bit of time to do some research!

2) Embrace a sustainable diet

It’s important to understand that eating healthy is a lifestyle, and as such it needs to be sustainable.

If you start a diet knowing that there’s no way you can tolerate it for long, you’re already setting yourself up for failure.

Eating healthy should become an integral part of life. The good news about it is that as soon as you get used to eat well, you can easily tell how much better you feel, not only physically but also mentally! A client of mine said that he’s never felt so full of energy in his entire life; another one that she can feel a huge difference in her ability to focus.

When I eat badly for a particular occasion, I realize how grumpy this makes me feel. Therefore, there’s no effort involved to go back on track: it’s my body that wants to go back on track!

This doesn’t mean that you need to always be perfect. Perfection doesn’t exist. But you should aim at eating well most of the time (and as said before, this shouldn’t come as difficult). You can allow yourself a 10-20% of your daily life when you are not that conscious about what you are eating. You may let most of your social interactions fall into that interval: this way, a healthy diet won’t affect your social life (remember, healthy eating should be sustainable. If you decline your friends’ invitations because you want to stick to your diet, sooner or later you will give up).

3) Learn to love your food

If you identify a healthy diet with boring, tasteless plates, please consider to change your mindset about it. If you embrace the two steps above, i.e. you start from high-quality ingredients and are committed for the long run, by experimenting and having fun you will come up with delicious recipes that are good for your health, too.

For instance, you may love a cake that happens to contain lots of refined sugar and saturated fats. Instead of giving it up completely (which won’t be sustainable, see step 2), you can swap some ingredients, such as saturated fats with mashed bananas or greek yogurt, and create a new delicious recipe that you can enjoy with no regrets.

If you learn to approach healthy food with a creative attitude, your meals will become a magical moment, when you celebrate your body and show some love for yourself.