Once you get to the age of about 25, life starts to get a heck of a lot more manic. You get married, start a job, move out. After a while, the very last thing on your mind is your weight and health. And then, one day, you see yourself in the mirror, and it hits you. You’re overweight.
It happens to the best of us. You get so busy and bogged down in life’s challenges that healthy living falls by the wayside. You’re in constant pursuit of convenience, looking for the next easy meal. Diet gurus keep telling you that the solution is to get in the kitchen and work harder. But that is just the last thing that you want to do when you get in after a long day. Surely there’s an easier way.
Though there’s no substitute for a healthy diet, made with a wide variety of whole foods, there are certain things you can do to improve your diet. The following are all the ways you can improve what you eat, without going to all that extra hassle. So let’s get stuck in.
Drink Hot Cocoa
Cocoa, the powdered stuff that comes in a little tub – it’s good for you. Don’t confuse cocoa with chocolate, or drinking chocolate. These contain far too much sugar and fat. Cocoa is the defatted cocoa bean, ground up and usually used in baking.
But you can also put it in a drink, and it’s no harder to make than instant coffee. But why would you want to drink cocoa in the first place? Well, for many reasons, actually. The first is that it’s very good for you. Mayan kinds swore by it. And Western scientists are finally conceding that it’s one of the best substances around for freeing up your arteries.
The other reason is that it’s high in things like iron and calcium. Women who are rushed off their feet rarely get enough of these minerals. So cocoa sort of doubles as a vitamin supplement, with an extra antioxidant punch.
You can have cocoa as it is with boiling water, or you can mix in a little almond or rice milk to make it richer.
Order a Side of Veggies
Busy women tend to eat out a lot. But, as we all know, the food out isn’t exactly the sort of stuff you’d find down at Whole Foods. It’s layered in grease and rich in sugar, all to make it more palatable.
When you’re out at a restaurant next time, don’t order a side of fries. Go with veggies instead. Vegetables are amazing at undoing some of the harmful effects of the rest of your meal. One thing they’re great at is binding with the bile in your gut and shifting it out the other end before it has the chance to do any damage. And like cocoa, veggies are packed full of vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
Drink Tea
People have been drinking tea for thousands of years. But it’s only recently that it’s gained something of a Western audience.
Tea has been shown to be good for you on a number of levels. First, people who drink tea (minus the cow’s milk) have better arterial function. But tea has also been associated with longevity and healthier aging. Green tea is the best, and also the simplest to make. Just pour boiling water on top of the tea bag. If you don’t like the flavor of green tea straight, you can always pick up flavored tea bags with added lemon or ginger.
Buy Healthy Condiments At The Supermarket
Traditionally, condiments were bad news. They were high in sugar and low in fat. But, as explained in this article about Hampton Creek, food producers are now making healthy alternatives.
This is good news for busy moms. Instead of lazily grabbing your usual brand of mayonnaise or peanut butter, look for the healthier brands. They’ll protect your health and won’t require any dramatic changes in lifestyle.
Dunk You Carrot Sticks
Carrots by themselves aren’t very tasty, and they aren’t very filling. As a result, we get bored of them and start reaching for the cookies. But carrots dipped in hummus are a totally different story. Hummus, when made fresh is both healthy and moreish, and bound to help you stay away from those unhealthy treats.
Order Your Entree – Take Half Of It Home
Restaurants are in the business of serving up “experiences.” As a result, portion sizes have inflated so much that they wouldn’t be recognized as portions by our grandparents.
Next time you go to the restaurant, don’t eat the entire meal. Instead, eat half of it, and then save the rest for your partner or your next meal. Eating less in a single sitting puts you at a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, and diabetes.
Go For The Shrimp
When you’re out, check the menu for the healthier alternatives. Most menus will be thick with pies, beef joints, and stuff that’s generally not all that great. But often, restaurants will do a shrimp dish. And these little critters are a lot healthier than your average restaurant fare.
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For starters, they’re low in fat and low in calories. But they’re also not farmed as intensively as meat, so they are much closer to their wild counterparts. Just check that the shrimp isn’t breaded. Otherwise you’ll be piling on the calories as with any other, regular dish.
Order Pizza, Skip The Cheese
Pizza without cheese might sound like heresy, but once you’ve gotten used to it, it’s not that bad. Plus it’s literally zero effort to ring up and ask for a pizza without cheese.
Most people don’t realize that it’s actually the cheese that contains the majority of calories in pizzas. The base and the toppings aren’t all that calorific.
If possible, load your pizza up with pineapple, mushrooms, and veggies.
Skip Ice Cream, Go Frozen Yogurt
Fat contains nine calories per gram. Carbohydrates only four. So pound for pound, ice cream (mainly fat) contains fewer calories than frozen yogurt (mostly carbs). Nobody is going to claim that frozen yogurt is healthy. But there’s a lot of reason to think that it’s healthier, if only because it’s lighter on calories.
Look out for frozen yogurt that’s low on sugar and high on flavor.
Ditch The White Pasta
Pasta is a go-to meal for many women after a hard day at work. You just open the packet, pour it into boiling water and let it cook for about 8 minutes. Easy.
There’s just one problem. White pasta isn’t good for you. The germ and the bran, the bits that have all the nutrition, have been stripped away. White pasta is devoid is nutrients and not healthy.
Choose Good Decaf Tea
Not all decaf tea is created equal. Many of the antioxidants in tea are lost in certain decaffeination processes. If the packet says that the tea was decaffeinated using the ethyl acetate method, swap out for another brand. This method removes much of the antioxidant capacity of the tea leaves, leaving them nutritionally defunct.
Be Picky About The Salad Dressing
So, you’ve started eating salads? That’s great. Salads are healthy, varied and rich in nutrients.
But a great salad can quite easily be derailed by a not so great salad dressing. Many commercial salad dressings are rich in the wrong types of oil. Stay away from oils that are low on alpha-linolenic acid content, like those based on soybean oil. Go for dressings based on olive or canola oil instead.
Buy Better Bread
Sliced white bread might be convenient. You just bung it in your bread bin at the beginning of the week, and it does an excellent job of providing you with toast every morning. But sliced white bread, like white pasta, is devoid of goodness.
Grab a whole loaf of wholemeal bread, without the preservatives. As soon as you buy it, slice it up and then put it in the freezer. That way it won’t go stale. Then you can just pick up slices whenever you need them and put them in the toaster. It’s healthy, wholemeal bread, made easy.
Snack On Nuts
Anybody who has tried to go on a healthy diet knows that the office is their mortal enemy. Every five minutes somebody is passing around some sort of delectable treat.
Worry not. You can fight temptation by keeping a stash of dried fruit and nuts in your desk drawers. Every time somebody offers you a cookie say no; then chow down on a handful of nuts.
Take Fruit To Work
Fruit is nature’s convenience food. So why not take fruit to work with you, and chomp on it while you’re at your desk or on a break? Grab an apple, orange, kiwi or banana and make your break a little healthier.