The Key to a Healthful Diet

A great strategy for improving your eating habits, is to pay more attention to incorporating a wide variety of healthful, high-quality foods into your daily life.

The more you focus on eating lots of nutrient-dense foods, the less room (& less desire) you'll have for the non-nutritious, high-calorie junk food that your body doesn't need. Here are some great ways to add more healthful foods into your diet:

• Choose fresh instead of processed foods whenever possible. Limit the foods that come in a box or package. Shop mostly along the perimeter of the store where fresh & refrigerated foods are found. Fill your shopping cart with plenty of fresh produce.

• Increase your vegetable & fruit consumption with frozen produce. When you run out of fresh produce, you can always turn to your freezer to add extra veggies to soups, stir-frys, pastas, etc. And frozen fruit can make a healthful treat or can be added to oatmeal or smoothies. Check the ingredient list to ensure nothing has been added to the produce (no salt, butter, sugar, sauce, etc.). As long as nothing has been added, frozen veggies & fruits are just as healthful as fresh - sometimes even more so since they are frozen at their peak.

• Eat raw, unsalted nuts & seeds for protein and healthy fats.

• When you buy processed foods, choose products that have whole, natural, nutrient-dense ingredients. The shorter the ingredient list, the better. When purchasing bread, look for the ingredient "whole wheat," not "wheat" or "enriched wheat".

• Avoid products with artificial flavorings, artificial colorings and hydrogenated oils.

• Limit products that contain sugar & salt. If your product does contain sugar or salt, make sure it is listed toward the end of the ingredients list.

Filling up on high quality whole foods will help your body stay balanced & energetic and will help you achieve a healthy weight without feeling deprived.