Your Nutrition Isn’t Just What And How Much You Eat, It’s Also How Well You Eat

Most nutrition regimes and diet plans primarily focus on WHAT foods you should eat and HOW much of it you should eat. We have a handle on the knowledge that no matter what we eat, we know it’s crucial to learn to stop eating when we are full, even if our plate is full of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

However, it’s not just important to be mindful of what and how much you eat, but maybe more importantly, HOW WELL you eat.

Enter: Your Daily Rituals

Better habits, like good nutrition, can be built and incorporated into your daily rituals. Here’s how you can build better habits for your daily rituals. If practiced daily, it will ultimately level up your health and life.

How to Eat Well by Including Nutrition Into Your Daily Rituals

1. Practice meal planning. Planning what you’ll eat, even when grocery shopping, assures that you are making healthier choices especially when you get hungry. Meal planning is ideal for when you are busy or don’t have much time to prepare a meal from scratch.

Meal planning can consist:

• Prepping and precooking your key meal bases, such as quinoa, brown rice, lentils, and beans. These bases serve as the basic foundation where you can then easily add veggies and quickly whip up unique dishes.
• Pre-chopping your fruits and vegetables allows you to control your food weight and track how much you consume daily to ensure you get enough nutrients. Sometimes, it’s hard to keep up with getting the right amount of fruits and veggies when we’re on the go. Pre-chopping your fruits and veggies helps.

2. Drink 16 ounces of water. I highly recommend drinking at least 16 ounces of lemon or lime water when you wake up and 30 minutes to an hour before each meal. Drinking water helps strengthen your immune system, improve your skin, and reduce the risk of heart disease. Also, drinking 16oz of water before your meals will help kickstart your digestive system by maintaining the digestive enzymes in your stomach for optimum digestion. It will also increase the feelings of fullness to prevent overeating and cleanse your body by speeding up your metabolism.

3. Snack throughout the day. Eating every two to four hours ensures that your metabolism is activated and stays in the fat-burning zone. Waiting more than four hours can potentially slow down your metabolism, causing your body to start storing fat. The key is to eat every two to four hours, which keeps calories coming in and out. The best way to achieve this is by snacking on fruits and vegetables, as this will keep you full with less calorie intake and provide you with more nutrients.

4. Have a hearty lunch. Make your biggest meal of the day around lunchtime. It’s wise to have your heaviest meal be your lunch because your digestion is most dominant when the sun is highest between 12 p.m. and 3 p.m. Your body will process the food faster as it burns more energy throughout the day than at night.

5. Eat breakfast after working out. Having your breakfast after your workout will give your body immediately what it needs to energize and rebuild. Consider having a superfood smoothie after working out in the morning and combining it with carbohydrates and fruits, like oatmeal with berries.

Which of these nutrition tips will you start including in your daily rituals? Which ones are you already practicing? Find more natural nutrition and wellness tips here.