Do You Make These Mistakes On Your Healthy Diet Plan?
- Details
- June 28
My favorite sweet treat is fruit - I could eat it all day long!
I make mistakes all the time - in my healthy diet plan and other areas of my life. One time when I was making a white bean dip, I thought I'd try a bit of mustard powder. I accidentally dumped in a huge amount.
Rather than scooping it out, I figured it wouldn't be that bad and just mixed it in. I was wrong. Even with another can of beans added to the mix, that mustard was not going to be muted.
When it comes to a healthy diet plan, there are lots of mistakes that you can make. The key is to learn from them and keep moving forward. Being aware of some of the common mistakes that other people have made can help you avoid making them in first place.
Mistake #1 - Overdosing on Treats
Our tastebuds - and our brains - are programmed to like sugar. It is, after all, our body's prime source of energy. Not everyone has a sweet tooth, but we all have a carb tooth. BBQ potato chips have a lot of simple carbs under the layer of salt, flavoring and fat.
I don't know about you, but when I'm trying to stick to a super healthy diet plan, I sometimes want to treat myself for being so good. Or I want to finish off a meal with just a little something sweet. You deserve it, right?
Giving in to occasional sweets is totally fine, but the problem is that when you give in to a chocolate bar, a gigantic coffee shop cookie or even those BBQ chips, it can be hard to stop yourself.
Refined sugars, fats and salt are all addictive (not to mention the caffeine in chocolate), so even when you only plan to have a little taste you can wind up with an empty bag of cookies in no time.
Solution:
Figure out something healthier that's a treat for you. For me, fruit is enough to put me in sugar bliss. Phil loves when I make him healthy cookies, using whole grain flours and unrefined sugars. We both love having frozen fruit ice cream.
If you're more of a salt tooth, try making your own hummus or air-popped popcorn. One of my favorite salty treats is to put a bit of almond butter on a rice cake with cucumber slices and sprinkle them with salt.
Mistake #2 - Demonizing Fat
It used to be that a healthy diet plan meant eating little or no fat. Luckily, we've learned that's ridiculous, but the fear of fat is still lingering in the backs of our minds. Especially with the discovery that hydrogenated fats are so bad and in so many foods.
I'm not an extreme person, so I wouldn't go so far as to call hydrogenated or highly refined fats evil incarnate, but they have absolutely no benefit and can do you a lot of harm - especially if you eat them regularly for a long time.
Solution:
The trick is to get the fat content of your healthy diet plan from whole foods like avocados, nuts, seeds, grains and beans. Getting your fat from those sources not only makes sure you're getting high-quality, fresh fats and other nutrients, but they make it harder for you to eat too much fat.
Their calorie density is so much lower than oils and processed foods. It's still possible to eat too much fat, of course, but you'll be way ahead of the potato chip-guzzling masses.
Mistake #3 - Nutrition as Religion
A basic healthy diet plan is pretty simple - eat lots of whole, unprocessed plant foods. Avoid processed and refined foods. Oh yeah, and drink lots of water.
Once you shift to that kind of healthy eating plan, you'll start to feel a whole lot better than you did eating a Crappy Standard American Diet. And yet, from that base level of healthy eating you can do even better.
Some people have figured out how to do better, and they want to share what they've learned with everyone else. The trouble is, they figure that everyone else needs the same things they needed to get to optimal health.
Each person is unique - not only in tastes and culture, but in actual biochemical and structural ways. We process foods differently, we absorb foods at different rates, and we have different needs for certain foods and nutrients.
Solution:
To find your own optimal health, don't get caught up following someone else's path - especially when they tell you that you have to follow it strictly or else you'll wind up in nutritional hell.
Their path might be helpful to you, but then again it might be the opposite of what you need. Even worse, it might just be a marketing gimmick to sell you a book or some nutritional supplements.
Finding your own path to a healthy diet plan can be really tough. I've been working on mine for a long time now, and I feel pretty fantastic but I also know that I'll just keep learning for the rest of my life - as my body and my knowledge changes.
The important thing is to get started and not be afraid to change things as you go and as you learn. Don't be discouraged by your mistakes - keep learning from them instead.
Which health mistake do you seem to make regularly, and what is 1 simple way you can overcome it? Let me know by leaving a comment below.
Hey guys, this is Heather from healthyeatingstartshere.com. So, today I wanted to talk a little bit about mistakes in following a healthy diet plan. I make mistakes all the time, I’m not afraid to admit it. I make mistakes in cooking, in nutrition.
I make mistakes just in average personal life. I always hit my head on things somehow. I inherited that from my dad.
Anyway, the important thing with mistakes is to learn from them and move on and make things better for yourself for the future. Now, one of the most common mistakes I’ve ever see in nutrition is - people taking nutrition as kind of religion.
There are certain diet plans that can get pretty extreme, and what happens is that people take them too far, and don’t take into account their own personal, unique needs. Everyone is different, everyone react differently to different things.
Now, there is a base level of a healthy eating plan that you need to get to before you can tune in to these individual needs. And the base level of healthy eating is basically eating lots of plant foods, eating lots of whole unprocessed foods, and avoiding refined, processed stuff. And make sure you drink a lot of water.
So, when you shift to a basically whole, unprocessed food diet, you’re going to feel a lot better. But, you can even feel a lot better than that by taking you diet to the next level — which is making it unique for you. Now, a lot of people have discovered what works for them, and some of them go on a crazy kick where they want to spread it throughout the world how awesome they can feel on this diet, which is a great thing.
You can’t blame them for wanting to spread what made them feel good. The only trouble is if you follow someone else’s diet too strictly, it might not work for you. It might, and that's great, but if it doesn’t you have to be able to pay attention to your body, to what isn’t working for you.
So, don’t make the mistake of following someone else’s healthy eating plan path too strictly as a religion. Take it as a trial run, and go from there. But the important thing is to get into the base level of healthy eating first and you can listen to your own body.
Now, that can be very difficult to do, and I’m pretty excited because I’m finishing up putting together something that’s going to help you guys do that, and I’ll be posting more information over this for the next few weeks. But for now, I just want to say — as you go, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, mistakes are how you learn.
The important thing again is to learn from them and move forward. So I want to know from you guys, what mistake you make — the biggest mistake you tend to make in terms of your healthy eating plan, and what is one simple way you have found to fix that.
Let me know, leave me a comment. I posted a couple of other common mistakes on my blog, you can check that out over at healthyeatingstartshere.com.
