How to Make Eating Healthy Easier: 14 Practical Tips

If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t tell anyone, but there would be signs…. Like hiring a private chef to cook for me 24/7/365 😂 Then I’d have no excuse for not eating 3 healthy meals a day.

*sigh* A girl can dream.

As someone who grew up on boxed meals and TV dinners, I’ve struggled most of my life to eat healthy. Try as I might, it just doesn’t come easy to me.

There were about 2 solid years when I ate healthy, home-cooked meals most nights before I reverted to convenience foods and eating out more often than not.

What changed?

I started working full-time and every second of every day became too overwhelming, so cooking was put on the back burner. Sound familiar?

14 Tips to Make Eating Healthy Easier

Even with the best intentions, after trying time and time again to change my eating habits and failing, I decided to ask myself this simple question:

→ Why is it so hard to eat healthy? ←

Simply put, it’s because take out, frozen meals, and boxed dinners are:

• Simple
• Easy
• Quick
• Taste good

In other words, because they’re convenient. And eating healthy traditionally isn’t.

So in order to eat healthy, we have to make it more convenient, which is exactly what this post will help you do. 🙂

Simplify your meals.

Complicated is the complete opposite of convenient, which is a big part of why it’s so hard to stick to eating healthy. It’s just too much mental and physical work on top of everything else in life.

I noticed that when I muster up the strength to cook, I find myself making complicated meals with 20 different ingredients and 4 different sets of instructions and it’s a lot to manage. Like, a lot.

So my biggest piece of advice?

Choose recipes with 10 ingredients or less, or make your own meals that are 50% vegetables/fruit, 25% protein, and 25% whole grains. No need to overcomplicate it.

Add a tasty little sauce to dress it up and you have yourself a fool-proof meal every time.

Use a food processor to quickly cut fresh produce.

One of the more tedious aspects of cooking healthy meals is the prep work that goes into them, particularly when it comes to preparing the vegetables.

To cut down on prep time, I highly recommend investing in a food processor or manual food chopper. They give you the perfect dice and slice every time, and can do it way faster than you ever could with just a knife.

It’s also a great way to sneak extra vegetables into your diet – simply shred and add them to meatballs, pasta sauce, zucchini bread, and more.

You can even chop enough for a few nights (or even the whole week) to help save even more on prep time and cleanup.

Use frozen fruits & vegetables.

Frozen vegetables are a great way to add micronutrients, flavor, and texture to your meals without requiring any prep. All you gotta do is cook them.

Frozen fruit is also great to have on hand. I use it in smoothies, healthy crisps and cobblers, and honestly even just to snack on. I love a slice of frozen peach and mango.

Since they’re frozen at their peak, they still contain many nutrients and lots of flavor to enjoy whenever you want.

Most recipes will work just fine substituting frozen for fresh and will help make healthy eating easier on ya.

Get yourself an Instant Pot.

Now onto the cooking part – K.I.S.S. applies here, too, my dude.

Nobody likes slaving away at the stove every night.

The Instant Pot is the little machine that could, with several different cooking options:

• Pressure cooker
• Slow cooker
• Rice cooker
• Steamer
• Saute
• Sous vide
• Bake
• Yogurt maker
• Sterilizer
• Warmer

It allows you to make all different types of meals with this one device.

I particularly like it for the pressure cooker because it cooks things quickly, and the slow cooker because it allows you to just dump everything in and let it cook while you go about your day.

You can even use it to cook raw beans and lentils, rather than using the stovetop or canned variety.

The actual cooking you have to do is minimal (if at all), and cleanup is a breeze, which makes cooking healthy meals much more convenient.

Make one-pan and sheet pan meals.

Another great option for meals with minimal cooking and clean up are one-pan or one-pot meals and sheet pan meals.

You either cook everything in one pot or pan, or throw everything on a sheet pan in the oven and let it cook.

The less pans and devices you need to cook with, the simpler and easier it is to manage cooking. You have one thing, and one thing only, to focus on which takes a lot of the overwhelm out of the equation.

Not to mention you have less to clean up, too, which helps a lot with the overwhelm.

Follow the 80/20 rule. 

Life without cookies is a life I don’t want to live. I imagine you agree.

So don’t!

Instead of processed and refined foods making up the majority of your diet, treat them as what they are: Treats. Something you have on occasion.

I find if I restrict myself and label foods as “good” and “bad,” I feel a lot of guilt and shame when I want a cookie or burger. And when I give in to those cravings, I think I’m bad for eating them.

The foods you eat on occasion (or in smaller quantities) don’t have as much of an impact as the ones you eat the majority of the time. The negative emotions around them do, though.

So focus on eating at least 80% whole foods and allow yourself to indulge in guilty pleasures the other 20%.

Meal plan (and save it!).

Of course, how are you supposed to know what to cook if you don’t have a plan?

Spending a little bit of time thinking of meals before going grocery shopping lets you know exactly what you need when you get to the store instead of scrambling to think of something and undoubtedly buying a frozen pizza and macaroni and cheese because they’re easy.

I *highly* recommend keeping a running spreadsheet of your meal plans with links to recipes you like. This way, you can cycle back through them instead of thinking of new meals every week.

You could even go so far as to create an accompanying grocery list for each week that you can easily refer to when you eat those meals again. This is something I’m actively working on and encourage you to do the same!

Related: 14 Practical Tips to Prevent Food Waste & Save Money

Get your groceries delivered.

Or order online for pickup.

I don’t know what it is, but I absolutely loathe getting groceries. The traffic. The parking (especially the Trader Joe’s parking lot 🥲). The people. The time.

Which often turns into me getting takeout instead of groceries.

So if you’re anything like me, getting your groceries delivered (or at least ordering online and picking up in store) removes a huge barrier when it comes to eating healthier.

It takes away the added time and stress of grocery shopping while also minimizing the risk of buying things not on your list (which let’s be real is usually junk food).

Prep some meals in advance.

Meal prep is ❌not ❌ one-size-fits-all, which took me a long time to learn.

I personally can’t stand reheated chicken and the same meal for dinner every night, so I don’t meal prep my dinners. I sometimes prepare ingredients that go into those meals ahead of time, like batch cooking grains and prechopping vegetables to eat throughout the week, but that’s the extent of that.

The only meal I completely prepare ahead of time is breakfast, because it’s my least favorite meal of the day and mornings are too busy to try and make something healthy.

If I don’t have breakfast prepared ahead of time, I either:

Either way, I end up hangry and it throws off my entire day, which impacts my eating choices throughout the rest of the day.

I recommend trying this out for at least a week with your most difficult meal of the day and see if it helps you. Yes, it can be a small commitment up front, but it really helps set you up for success which in my book is worth it.

Make snack boxes.

I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve explicitly bought fruit, vegetables, and hummus instead of granola bars to snack on and proceeded to not eat them because it was too much work to wash them, cut them, and dish out the hummus whenever I wanted a snack.

The simple solution here is to wash it all at once, then make it into snack boxes. So whenever you want a snack, you simply grab a snack box out of the fridge and eat it. No thinking required.

Some of my favorites are:

• Veggies with hummus
• Celery with peanut butter
• Apple with peanut butter
• Salami, cheese, nuts

Related: 17 Healthy Vegan High-Protein Snacks

Learn how to properly prepare vegetables.

I’m a firm believer that *almost* anything will taste good if it’s prepared right – especially when it comes to vegetables.

If you’re someone who hates vegetables, you’re a liar because potatoes are vegetables and how can you hate potatoes??

In all seriousness, if you hate most vegetables, it’s probably because you aren’t preparing them right. I hated kale until I realized you need to massage it to break it down so it’s not tough. And I hated brussels sprouts (even from my favorite restaurant!!) until my sister-in-law made a roasted brussels sprout salad and I wanted more. And my husband is the complete opposite — he liked the restaurant brussels sprouts more than the one’s our sister-in-law made. 🤷🏼‍♀️

So what I’m saying is, do a little research and experiment on how to cook vegetables in a way you like (or can at least tolerate).

And if you find something you just don’t like no matter what, then don’t eat it. There are plenty of other vegetables in the garden you may like better, so focus on those instead.

Try a meal delivery kit.

I kept getting coupons in the mail for free meals from several meal delivery kits and finally decided to try them. I did not expect it to live up to the influencer hype, but it did, for so many reasons.

• There’s no meal planning
• No grocery lists
• No grocery shopping
• Very minimal prep
• Not much (if at all) more expensive than buying groceries myself
• Simple and easy
• Peaceful

All you have to do is choose your meals, then when it comes time to make them, you just grab the bag out of the fridge and follow the instructions. You don’t have to search for all the ingredients – they’re literally right there in the bag.

Even getting just 3-4 dinners for the week takes so much stress and planning and difficulty out of eating healthier. I absolutely loathe grocery shopping, so not having to make a meal plan and get groceries was honestly a huge weight off my shoulders when I needed it most.

So don’t sleep on meal delivery kits if you can afford it, even a few nights a week.

I tried Home Chef and Green Chef. Home Chef tasted better, but Green Chef was healthier.

Eat at the table.

Yes, eat at the table.

If part of your aversion to cooking a healthy, homemade meal is the dishes you need to clean up after eating and settling down on the couch for the night, then eat at the table.

It’s less comfortable than the couch and you’re not immersed in your stories, so when you walk in the kitchen to put your plate away, you’ll be much more likely to just clean up the rest of the dishes instead of leaving them for tomorrow.

Trust me, it works.

Have fun with it.

Cooking feels like such a chore because we’ve made it out to be one. Yes, it is something we have to do multiple times a day every day and some days it will feel like a chore, but if we change how we view it, it won’t feel so daunting.

So find a new recipe or cookbook, put on some music or podcast or even TV show, and start cooking. Go into it knowing you’re making a nourishing meal for you (and potentially your loved ones), and learn to enjoy it.

And if that just isn’t gonna happen, try to at least be neutral about it instead of stressing over it. Take it from me, it’s not worth the stress.