Healthy eating is one of the core components of a healthy life. Of course, this doesn’t mean you should be extremely strict about what you are eating. You should live well, enjoy good meals and not worry about your calorie intake too much.

However, if you are an overall unhealthy eater, or you are trying to lose weight, or you are gaining too much unnecessary weight, you may need to look at what you are eating because this can result in poor health outcomes in the long term.

Plenty of healthy eating tips are available online. But in this article, I’d like to focus on some of the crucial things that are often overlooked but influence our eating habits.

So, here are 11 science-backed healthy eating tips that have helped me improve my eating habits.

Healthy Eating Tips For A Better Health And A Healthy Weight

1. Counting the calories for the right reasons.

First things first: The purpose of counting the calories is not to cut down calorie intake to an extreme. Extreme calorie restriction is harmful to your body as it can lead to muscle loss in the long term. 

The reason for this calorie counting is to see what you are eating/drinking– to analyze the quality of your diet. Writing down what you eat helps you assess where the excessive calories come from. 

You will be surprised to see how much calorie-dense junk foods generally are. They take up a lot of your daily goal of calorie intake. 

For example, a large bag of chips can contain 500 calories. If your daily requirement is 2000 calories, 500 calories is a large portion of junk food. 

On top of this, being simple carbohydrates, junk food can trigger sugar cravings. Therefore, junk food can lead you to eat more and eventually cause weight gain.

On the other hand, if you snack on something healthy, like a sandwich, even with a meat-based sandwich, you will consume a lot fewer calories. 

For example, a chicken sandwich would be less than 300 calories (can vary). If you are going for a plant-based protein, the total calories will be even less. 

This snack will fill you up for a longer time, actually curb your hunger, and will be more nutritious. 

The bottom line is that you can eat more healthy food if you consume less junk food, staying within the recommended daily calorie intake.

 You don’t have to do calorie counting daily afterwards if you don’t want to; just in the beginning to assess your diet.

Do This Exercise:

• If you are just getting started, the first few days, don’t alter your diet and eat like you do every day, including the junk intake. 

• Note down everything you eat and internet search the calories in them roughly (you can also use fitness apps). 

• Before going to bed, add the calorie intake. If you consume more than your daily recommended calorie intake, try to see what foods (usually junk food) you can eliminate.

Once you do this, you’ll see you don’t need to eat less of your meals to lose weight (in most cases).

P.S. Make a habit of checking the labels of the food, snacks and drinks you consume.

2. Limiting Liquid Source Of Calories

The reason for this is the same as above, but this needed a special mention as people forget to count in liquid sources of calories.

Drinks can bring in a lot of calories. Sodas, energy drinks, fruit juices, sports drinks, tea, coffee, etc– all can be sources of high amounts of sugar if you overdo them.

I’m not saying you can’t enjoy your tea or coffee with sugar. But it’s important to consider if you consume too many cups of tea or coffee. 

Processed drinks and sodas may contain a lot of sugar. Even home-made fruit juices contain a lot of free sugar, which can cause a blood glucose spike.

Therefore, limiting liquid sources of calories can be helpful to cut down unnecessary calorie influx and prevent overdoing of sugar.

Tip: Keep in mind that the thing with liquids is that they are not very filling. If you are hungry and you drink something, it’s not going to keep you full for a very long time. Plus, if it’s a sugar rich drink (and even with artificial sweeteners) it can trigger sugar-cravings. So, if you are hungry don’t just drink something, eat something that will keep you full for longer.

3. Consume Sugar And Other Simple Carbs The Right Way

As mentioned in the 1st point, no one ingredient is evil, including sugar. You don’t have to stop living to live a longer life. 

But when you overdo something, that can lead to health issues over time.

Sugar is not evil, but it is a double-edged sword as sugar can trigger a bigger binge of sugar intake. 

Sugar Intake and Sugar Cravings

P.S: Sugar= Sugar and other simple carbohydrates.

When you consume sugar-rich foods/drinks, your blood sugar levels spike. This triggers the release of insulin from the pancreas, which soon clears out the elevated blood sugar levels. This causes a drop in blood sugar levels. You can feel it as tiredness and reduced focus.

Now, our body needs a steady supply of glucose to function well. Therefore, a drop in blood sugar levels triggers cravings for more sugar or simple carbohydrate-rich foods. As a result, you will consume more sugar, and your body enters a vicious cycle of sugar cravings throughout the day. 

The ideal thing is to not enter this cycle. And you can do that by making some simple modifications to your eating habits.

The key to not having sugar cravings is:

• toconsume less sugar/simple carbs throughout the day, and also 
• to ensure that you are not consuming sugar early in the day, especially your breakfast. 

So this would include anything sweet: fruit juices, fruit smoothies, sweet protein bars, sweetened milk, and anything sweet and made of simple carbohydrates. Instead, make sure your breakfast has more protein and fats, with some carbohydrates or complex carbohydrates. 

Later in the day, whenever you want to eat something sweet, make sure you are eating sugar/sweet after a meal.

If one of the key components of your meal is a simple carbohydrate, like rice– worry not– you don’t have to quit eating it to prevent a sugar spike. What you can do is start with a little bit of salad or the vegetable portion of your meal. 

What this does is the fibres from the salad coat your gut, causing a slow absorption of simple carbohydrates that comes afterwards. Therefore, this will prevent a surge in blood sugar levels and sugar cravings later on. (1)(2)

Making these small changes in your eating habits will help control your unhealthy eating patterns. You will feel more energetic and less tired throughout the day. You will also experience less to no cravings for simple carbs.

4. Don’t Starve Yourself; You’ll Do More Damage

Starving yourself, also known as excessive calorie cutting, is the worst thing you can do when it comes to a healthy lifestyle and weight loss.

When you starve yourself, your body starts producing more amount of ghrelin, the hunger hormone which lets our brain know that the stomach is empty and that it’s time to eat. Therefore, the less you eat, the more hungry you feel. This is not good because, eventually you will snap and end up over-eating.

Secondly, starving yourself for a long time eventually leads to muscle destruction. This would mean a slowed-down metabolism, not to mention, a shorter life-span. This would also mean that once you start eating normally again, you will gain all the lost weight back very quickly in the form of excessive fat stores.

So, the best way forward is always to eat well.

Staying in a calorie deficit doesn’t mean starving yourself. You only need to reduce a couple of hundred calories from your diet– which in my experience, if you cut back on the junk intake and the “eating-when-bored” habit, becomes very easy and doable without starving yourself. Additionally, it is even easier if you add exercise to your schedule.

5. Sleep Well: Yes, Adequate Sleep Matters

When we sleep, our body resets and repairs itself. Regulation of hormones happens during sleep as well. These hormones include the hunger hormone, ghrelin, and the stress hormone, cortisol, among others.

Various studies have shown that poor sleep for just one night causes an increased level of ghrelin in our system, promoting increased daytime overeating. (3) (4)

When you don’t sleep well for a long time, the level of leptin, the satiety hormone, reduces. Low leptin levels combined with increased ghrelin levels lead to increased eating and promote unnecessary weight gain. (5)(6)(7)

Increased ghrelin and lowered leptin are generally also seen in people under extreme calorie restriction for weight loss/poor nutritional intake.

The imbalance in these hormone levels is worse in women and obese.

In addition to these two hormones, lack of sleep also increases the levels of cortisol, one of the stress hormones. Stress can cause various hormonal and behavioural changes and therefore, can lead to weight gain as well.

I’ve written a post explaining how stress affects various aspects of our body and causes weight gain. You can read more about stress and weight here: Can stress cause weight gain?

6. Incorporate exercise into your lifestyle, depending on your health status.

The benefits of exercise are no secret. Exercise is one of those key factors that benefits your whole body.

We also know exercise can help shed excess body weight. In addition to this, it also promotes those factors that can help control our eating habits and cravings.

For example, exercise promotes better sleep and reduces stress. Intense exercise also reduces appetite by producing an appetite-suppressing molecule that travels to the brain and tells it to suppress appetite. The anti-hunger molecule combined with the calories burnt during a workout session effectively helps us manage and reduce weight.

Additionally, the reason why I’m mentioning exercise as a part of healthy eating is because recent studies suggest that exercise combined with healthy eating is superior to healthy eating or exercise alone. 

Exercise + Healthy Eating > Exercise or Healthy Eating Alone

So, make sure you exercise a little bit. Also, you don’t need to exercise a ton. You only need 15 to 30 minutes of workout, five days a week, to stay healthy. You can read more about it in the article linked below.

7. Try to eat homemade food.

The idea is simple: This will help you have more control over what goes in your body and in what amount. 

Speaking of control, too much of anything is not good. It goes for everything– food, people, situations, habits– you name it. Therefore, you may notice that health regulatory bodies give recommendations regarding what food you should eat in what amount. For example, there is a recommended upper-safe limit for sugar and salt. Also, there are recommendations for how much carbs, proteins and fats you should eat. 

These recommendations are made based on research which tells us what happens when you eat more or less of any nutrient. These recommendations keep changing/updating depending on the latest research. But these values help us decide how much is too much.

It’s not that if you consume too much salt in a day, you will develop hypertension the next day. But if you overdo salt every day for many decades, you may eventually develop hypertension.

And this is why cooking the food yourself at home comes in handy. You will rarely overdo salt, sugar, carbs or fats in a home-cooked meal. You will never need to count calories with the food you cook yourself. 

Tip: I am a big supporter of traditional foods. It doesn’t matter what culture you come from, try to go back to your roots. Most traditional foods are very healthy in composition. So, get together with your parents/grandparents or find recipes for your people. With these foods, you will never have to worry about nutritional deficiencies. With homemade traditional foods, you will never have to worry about overdoing salt, sugar, carbs or fat.

8. Eat more complex carbohydrates, protein and healthy fats.

The thing about simple carbohydrates is that they are quickly metabolized, and therefore, they don’t keep you full for a long time. They may also cause more sugar/carbohydrate cravings.

You do not experience this with complex carbohydrates as they are slowly metabolized.

This is also true for fats and proteins. They are also broken down slowly, and therefore, you stay full for a longer time.

I know many people label carbs and fats as the evil macronutrients that cause weight gain, and the recent trend is to promote eating a lot of protein. 

But it is not the carbs or the fats that are the devil in reality, it’s our eating habits that are to blame. What we need to remember is that too much of anything is bad for you. This goes for proteins as well.

Keep in mind

Consuming proteins more than 2g/kg per day is linked to kidney stones. Additionally, if your source of protein is red meat, you are at a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease and colon cancer in the long term.

Eating more protein and fats doesn’t mean only eating proteins and fats and not eating simple carbs at all. You should eat carbs, fat and proteins for the best possible health outcomes. You can eat more complex carbs instead of simple carbs, but eliminating carbs is not the solution.

9. Drink Plenty Of Water

We are 60% water. So, water means life for us– quite literally. 

Staying hydrated is essential for our cells. Our brain needs proper hydration for optimal function. There are many other health benefits to drinking an appropriate amount of water. 

It makes sense why drinking healthy amounts of water is one of the most important and popular health advice you will hear. 

But drinking plenty of water is also a part of healthy eating because thirst can be misinterpreted as hunger by our body. So if you are feeling hungry shortly after eating a meal, it is either a craving or mild dehydration. In this case, drinking a glass of water will suppress your appetite.

Drinking more water also increases metabolism. Additionally, drinking plain water instead of sodas or other sugar-rich drinks when you are thirsty can help you reduce your liquid calorie intake.

Drinking water before each meal can also help you reduce your portion size– if that’s an issue for you.

So, drink more water! It will promote healthy eating habits.

10. Stop Stressing And Allow yourself to enjoy the pleasures of life. 

One thing I see that often happens with all the health-related articles and trends is that they sometimes create unnecessary fear. 

Sugar is bad, salt is evil, fat will kill you— these are some of the beliefs that have unfortunately established strong roots in our beliefs. However, again, it’s not that sugar, salt or fat is bad. It’s the excess of them that causes health issues. 

It is always the excess of anything that causes health issues.

We must remember that when we create such a fear-based belief system– regarding food, our weight, our health issues, etc– it creates stress in our bodies. When stress persists for a long time, it turns into chronic stress. Persistent stress elevates cortisol levels, which can lead to many health issues in the future.

So, if you have health concerns that are causing you excessive stress— it’s only making you more unhealthy– slowly but surely.

Stressing will only cause you to gain weight and make it hard for you to lose weight. In fact, stress can cause you to overeat.

Your concerns regarding health issues may be genuine, but stressing over it is definitely not helpful. If you have health anxiety, consider seeking help so that you can deal with it appropriately.

Stop labelling food as good or bad. You can enjoy everything. You can occasionally eat excessive salt, sugar, fat– you name it. You only need to ensure you don’t make it a habit.

Don’t stop living for the sake of health. It will likely kill you faster. Avoid the obvious unhealthy things, but eat healthy food well. Don’t be fearful of your food, there’s no reason to.

11. Love, Kindness, and Compassion Can Counter The Negative Effects Of Unhealthy Diet To Some Extent

Our thoughts and beliefs play an important role in our overall health and quality of life. Love, kindness and compassion towards others and yourself are extremely important, but not for feel-good reasons.

There’s an interesting study which is the basis of this claim. In 1978, a group of researchers were studying the effects of a high-fat diet on the heart and vascular system in rabbits. At the end of the research, it was found that a high-fat diet clogs the small blood vessels, as expected.

However, the surprising finding was that one group of rabbits were healthier despite being on the same diet as the other groups of rabbits. 

After much investigation, it was found that that group of rabbits were under the care of one specific post-doctoral candidate, who was particularly kind and loving towards the rabbits. The post-doctoral student handled the rabbits with kindness and love. As a result, despite being on a harmful diet, the rabbits still managed to be healthier.

This finding has been replicated to prove that there is a direct link between love and kindness and a healthier body. Again, this shows how sophisticated our physiology really is, naturally.

Please note that I am not suggesting not focusing on healthy eating at all. Of course, our natural physiological mechanisms have a limit to balance out the negatives, and once those limits are crossed, diseases manifest. But being kind and loving matters, even from the health point of view.

So, I would end this section with the simple message of having love and compassion towards self and others. Don’t label things as good or bad.

 Focus more on enjoying life. Enjoy healthy foods with cheat days, and live in the moment instead of worrying too much about your health or weight. 

Health is never a sprint; it is always a marathon. So, take it slow.

Additional Points To Keep In Mind About Healthy Eating

1. A word on diets

Stop following/listening to people who say that any one specific ingredient is bad or is making you unhealthy and that you need to completely avoid something if you want to be healthy. 

The exception here is for those with certain health issues that make it mandatory for you to restrict certain things. For example, a gluten-free diet if you have celiac disease, limiting carbs if you have type 2 diabetes, a low protein diet for CKD patients, being allergic to food items (like nuts), etc. In these cases, your doctor/health professional will tell you about the dietary restrictions wherever needed. 

The same goes for various diets. Veganism may not be for you. Keto diet may not work for you. Or, they may work for you. If something is working for you, great. But, if you don’t feel healthy or energetic being on a specific diet, it may not be for you.

Learn to listen to your body and how YOU feel when you eat a certain food, and make decisions according to that. When it comes to diets, no one rule fits all.

There’s no evidence that one particular diet can help all equally. Always listen to your own body and then decide for yourself. Don’t compare your plate with someone else’s. Just ask yourself, how is what you are eating making you feel physically?

2. Natural foods are superfoods. 

Don’t stress if you are not consuming any fancy labelled fruit or herb, tagged as a superfood. No one food can do it all. You will always need to consume different types of ingredients to fulfil your nutrient requirements. Go for the fruits and vegetables available to you in your local markets. No need to buy overly priced imported fruits and veggies.

3. do it slowly.

Whatever you are trying to achieve, do it slowly, do it patiently. This will help you stay consistent. Trying to do it fast– too much calorie restriction, too hard of an exercise routine, completely eliminating carbohydrates, fats, sugars etc, will likely make you feel weak and restricted.

Plus, extreme restrictions and routines can’t be followed for your whole life. So, relax, and take it easy. Make plans that you can follow most days for the rest of your life.

4. You can try mindful eating.

I have written a post about how to eat mindfully, related research and more about it. You can read it here: Mindful Eating: How To Eat Mindfully For Good Health.

5. Snack on healthy, low-calorie foods.

Fruits are great for snacking as they are filling, nutritious and low in calories. You can also snack on things like sandwiches, because again depending on the ingredients, they can be low calories as well.

If you are buying chips and similar products, look at the label for calorie content. Preferably go for the low-calorie ones. Otherwise, keep the portion size accordingly.

Remember, it’s not that you can’t eat chips. You can eat everything, but not in huge amounts and not daily.

6. Remember that habits take time to build.

Don’t be scared of failing– even if you have failed, don’t stop trying.

You may fall for your desires in the beginning, but stay mentally assertive with yourself and start again until you have built good eating habits. Desire is not necessarily an evil thing. Additionally, if you don’t starve yourself or add too many restrictions, desire shouldn’t be a problem for most.

Also, if you have issues like stress-eating or simply eating out of boredom, try to conquer it with good eating habits and behaviours. Mindfulness can be helpful here.

Good mental health and a positive outlook will help you follow through with good habit maintenance.

7. Only a balanced approach can be called healthy.

If you are eating too much or you are restricting yourself too much, both are not good for you in the long term.

Include the things in your diet that you like eating, and do exercises that make you happy instead of stressing out. If going to the gym is not your thing, do home workouts. 

Use what you have, don’t unnecessarily buy things or wait for the right time. Don’t wait for Monday, the new month, or the new year. Start today.

What you need is a balance; a balance between the simple pleasures of life and control. Balance equals healthy. Always.

If healthy living is stressing you out, you are doing it wrong.

– Project: Living Better