5 Ways to Improve Your Diet This Year

Most of us want to be healthier, but we have no idea where to start. Of course, the odds are that you’ve heard the basics: exercise more and eat better, but how do you actually do that? After all, the odds are that if you’re always making extreme changes to your diet, you won’t be able to stick to them, and you’ll end up falling into old habits once again.

Instead of trying to have a perfect diet, try to simply improve your diet bit by bit. For some tips on how to do this, keep reading.

1. Eat more seafood

Unfortunately, as much as you may love a good steak, it’s not good to be eating red meat all the time. And not everyone can go fully plant-based either. A simple way to lower your red meat intake but still get enough protein is to eat more seafood.

There are many benefits that can be gained from eating more seafood, so try to incorporate it into your diet once or twice a week.

If you consider yourself someone who doesn’t like seafood, the odds are that you just need to find the right type of seafood. For example, if a traditional meal of fish and chips isn’t your thing, you may want to try some premium seafood.

2. Eat more plant-based meals

As mentioned, not everyone can or even wants to go entirely plant-based when it comes to their diet. Luckily, this isn’t an all-or-nothing situation.

You can still enjoy your normal animal-based meals while also including more plant-based ones. By finding a balance between red meat, chicken, seafood, and plant-based meals, you will already be improving your diet a lot. A common way of incorporating more plant-based meals is to participate in Meatless Mondays – in other words, on Mondays, you don’t eat meat. If you need some inspiration, there are plenty of plant-based recipes out there for you to try.

3. Eat less processed food

Aside from including some healthy habits when it comes to your diet, you may also need to work on eliminating your bad habits. Most of us eat a lot of processed foods each day, and while processed food now and then isn’t harmful, it’s not ideal to have it take up most of your diet.

The reason so many of us opt for a processed option is that it’s often convenient and quick. Therefore, if you take some time each week to plan and prepare healthy meals and snacks, you will have a few alternatives to your normal processed options.

4. Find balance

You may notice that this post is all about balance, and that’s the key to creating a healthy diet that you can actually sustain, instead of a trend that you give up on within a week.

No one will eat perfectly healthy all the time, and that’s fine! There’s no reason why you can’t have cake on your birthday or a cocktail at your wedding – you just need to make sure that you are also focusing on having healthy meals when you can. For example, if you’ve eaten really unbalanced for a few days and you’re going out for dinner, you may want to try some ways of eating healthy even when dining out.

5. Focus on what you drink

We often think of our diet as consisting only of that which we eat. In a way, this is true, but your diet also depends on what you drink.

It doesn’t matter how healthy you eat if you have unhealthy drinking habits. Of course, this can refer to excessive alcohol consumption, but it also refers to other things – drinking a bottle of soda a day isn’t healthy, nor is drinking an extravagant Starbucks order each morning.

Once again, you don’t need to cut these things out, but you may find it helpful to limit them and replace them with water, as it’s very important to ensure that you drink enough water each day.

In conclusion

It may seem like having a healthier diet is impossible, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it’s often much harder than people make it out to be.

Instead of trying to be healthy at every moment, you should try to improve your diet by making small changes. Mostly, this means including more healthy things and cutting back on the unhealthy things – although there’s no need for you to ever completely eliminate anything from your diet since the key to a healthy and sustainable diet is balance.