10 Positive Healthy Diet Tips

Two years ago, my husband had a health scare: his lab results showed that he had high cholesterol, and his blood sugar was in the pre-diabetic range. Our doctor said he could take meds… or we could change his diet and have him test again in three months. We decided on a change of diet. Reading about healthy eating and listening to nutrition podcasts helped us a lot.

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Dieting “well”

Dieting for health is a tricky thing. Fad diets make you follow all sorts of eating rules, none of them sustainable in the long run. (Also, many fad diets—not to mention crash diets—are more obsessed with weight loss than becoming healthy.) Weight loss is a must if the person needs to lose the extra weight to be healthy, but it is not necessarily the point of changing to a healthier diet.

What is a diet anyway? The basic meaning of the word is what you eat, as used in the definition of, say, a herbivore (“plant diet”) or a carnivore (“animal diet”). For those who strive for a healthy diet, what to eat must be wholesome food—especially home-cooked food—which includes a proper balance of whole grains, proteins, vegetables, fruits, nuts, and healthy fats.

In my stint in Baby Magazine, a magazine for new parents that used to be printed in the Philippines, I interviewed a dietician who said that the diet to lose weight boils down to the math: weight loss = calories consumed < calories expended. That’s why doctors often tell patients to pair their diet with exercise when they recommend shedding some pounds. I find counting calories difficult; I once tried using the S Health app to do it, but honestly, I couldn’t sustain it. Plus, counting calories does not take into account the quality of the calories. (That’s why there’s such a thing as “empty calories,” or food that’s high in calories but low on the nutritional punch.)

Positive healthy diet tips

But what does all this have to do with the story I shared above? After two years since our new diet, I realize that changing one’s diet doesn’t have to be too difficult and full of restrictions. Because that only creates feelings of deprivation—the reason behind doing “cheat days,” which gradually will increase overtime until there is no more new diet to speak of at all.

Instead of a negative approach, how about a positive approach? Here, I’ve come up with some positive tips to make a healthy diet more sustainable—because healthy eating must be a change for life. These tips have helped my husband lower his cholesterol (without meds!) and get his blood sugar back to normal. He lost about 5 kg (he went from 70 kg to 65 kg) and now has a healthy stable weight for his height and age. Paired with an active lifestyle (weightlifting, walking), he has a good muscle tone and no more knee and ankle pain like before.

Cooking your own food at home means you know the ingredients that you put in there. for instance, it's hard to tell if a restaurant used coconut oil (good) or rapeseed oil (not so good). when you cook at home, you can pick the better oil.

1. Cook food at home. A fast-paced lifestyle is the enemy of eating healthy at home. But with foresight, it can be done. Buy a rice cooker that can cook while you’re away. If you like bread, buy fresh sourdough or seed breads from your local bakery. Plan the meal and make the necessary meal prep involved so all that needs to be done is a quick sauté or putting it all together. Buy a good variety of veggies that store well for a quick, healthy meal when you come home feeling like it’s “too late to cook.” Or, have kimchi, sauerkraut, or homemade pickles on hand so you don’t even need to cook them to add vegetables to the meal.

2. Have wholesome snacks. If you must snack, snack on wholesome foods like fresh fruits, roasted nuts, or full fat yogurt. And if you must snack, snack on the table and spend it in conversation with someone else. Because a snacker facing a screen (or reading a book) will not stop snacking. On a side note, we purposedly did not buy a couch for our living room (and no TV) to stop the habit of lounging around eating snacks of all sorts. A tip from minimalist influencer Samurai Matcha.

3. Read food labels. Educate yourself to read the labels of packaged food. Food labels are arranged according to the amount of the ingredients in it, so the first on the list is the one with the highest amount. If your peanut butter lists sugar first, for example, then that product has more sugar than peanuts in it. Also, the fewer items on the ingredients list, the better.

4. Drink water. Water is good for you! If it’s boring, turn it to lemon water or apple cider vinegar water (try this with sparkling water; it satisfies the craving for fizzy drinks). Make it icy cold or as warm as you like. The body is 70 percent water.

5. Mix up the proteins on the menu. When we changed our diet, we lessened our meat intake. But we still do eat meat, chicken, and fish. Animal proteins are essential, especially for children who are growing up and building up muscles! But there are meals when we eat just the non-meat sources of protein like beans, chickpeas, tofu, eggs, mushrooms, cheese, and natto.

6. Go for healthy desserts. Fresh fruits, dried fruits, stewed fruits, yogurt, nuts, dark chocolate, coconut milk-chia pudding… there are many ways to enjoy a little bite of sweetness at the end of a meal!

7. Go colorful. A naturally colorful spread is more enticing—and nutritionally varied. The visual feast also helps kids to be more interested in trying out new dishes.

8. Use different methods of cooking. Try steaming, roasting, and baking in the oven instead of the usual sauté or pan-grill/fry. Try different cuisines like Japanese, Indian, Korean, Mediterranean, and of course Filipino! Cooking other cuisines at home helps one to experiment with a variety of ingredients, seasonings, and spices to make the food more delicious.

9. Eat just enough for each meal. Many people diet by avoiding rice. What that does is it makes them eat more “other” food to compensate because they’re still feeling hungry. They end up eating more meat, for instance, or worse, more sugar. So, eat rice; pair it with plenty of veggies, a little protein, and some healthy fats (nuts, butter, avocado, coconut). Another great option is to swap out the rice with other whole grains: adlai, quinoa, barley, black or red rice. If that’s difficult to do, mix them in with the regular rice, soak for a few hours, and cook in the usual way. (Korean cuisine includes multigrain rice, as an example.) Learn to listen to your body because it does let you know when it’s time to stop eating.

10. Finally, after following all these tips, I recommend having fun with healthy food. Enjoy experimenting with food. Enjoy cooking for the family. Enjoy grocery shopping. Having fun makes it easier to sustain the change until it has become a habit, the norm. After that, you won’t eat any other way but the healthy way. And that’s when you know you did it right!

"Try steaming, roasting, and baking in the oven instead of the usual sauté or pan-grill/fry. Try different cuisines like Japanese, Indian, Korean, Mediterranean, and of course Filipino! Cooking other cuisines at home helps one to experiment with a variety of ingredients, seasonings, and spices to make the food more delicious."