I want to start this by saying that I am obviously not a doctor or a nutritionist, I am a chef. I am also someone who could stand to take his own advice a little bit more. So, in all honesty, I am writing this as much for you as I am for myself. 

Alright, let’s talk about how to eat healthy and not die.

There are a few secrets to eating healthy that are really easy to master. They take little to no extra time and can drastically change your life. What are they and how can you eat healthy? Let’s get into it.

What does it mean to eat healthy?

The first thing you need to do is define what eating healthy means to you. This may seem odd but a lot of people have a lot of different views on this. To some, eating healthy means eating vegan, or gluten-free, or Keto, or only bananas. You have to figure out what it is to you. What are you trying to accomplish?

For me, eating healthy means not eating take-out more than once every few months. It means eating salads with simple vinaigrettes with most meals. Not eating too much candy (which is hard for me) but a little is okay here and there. Really, for me eating healthy is not about exclusion. It’s about balance and eating less, a lot less of those fatty, salty, sweet things that we all know and love.

I find when I tell myself that I am going to fully exclude something from my diet it’s all I can think about. My mind is consumed with the thought of eating it until I break and binge on it. If I allow myself little things once in a while I find I am much less likely to binge, and I think about it a lot less. That’s why I don’t generally fully exclude anything from my diet.

Dieting is bullshit.

I don’t believe in dieting. I think that it is a self-defeating term. It implies a temporary situation. Being on diet means that eventually, you won’t be. Eventually, you will go back to eating the things you did before, and the way you did before. This will put you right back to where you started. I believe that if you want to lose weight and keep it off, or if you want to do anything for that matter, it’s about lifestyle change. A diet is like a band-aid on a severed finger. Yeah, it might hold it together for a second but without someone fully changing that finger’s circumstances by sewing back together, it’s not going to change.

Cook, cook, COOK!

Another thing I strongly believe in is that if you cook at home rather than eating out you are already miles ahead of most people. Of course what you cook matters. If you are cooking fatty, salty foods every day it isn’t going to be good for you. But, it will still be better than for people who eat delivery three or four times a week. To

I honestly believe that the single greatest thing you can do to affect your health other than exercise is to learn to cook. Cooking gives you control over what you put in your body. It gives you complete knowledge of salt content, and fat content because you are the one adding those fatty and salty ingredients.

When you do cook, cook and eat more vegetables than anything else. This is something I have trouble with. I love meat. I love it a lot, and I have never been terribly adventurous when it comes to cooking vegetables. This is definitely something I have to work on. I was brought up on meat and potatoes and I recently realized that that is pretty much how I still eat. It’s time for a change.

I am setting a goal for myself to eat vegetarian once or twice a week and to eat way more vegetables with every meal. Vegetables that aren’t just soaked in butter and salt. That is my goal to get healthy. Not to temporarily alter my diet, but to change how I eat going forward.

What about you?