Most people assume that eating healthy means forever consigned to eating tasteless bland food. They hear about the bodybuilder's diet of chicken breast, brown rice, and broccoli and turn up their nose and get turned off from making an effort to eat healthy. To most people a tasty meal usually means something with high amounts of fat, sugar, or salt and any deviation from that tastes like the impending doom of their taste buds.
I would like to introduce them to the wonderful world of flavorful spices, sweetness of natural sugars, nutty flavors, palate-stimulating textures, and mouth-watering colors. You can be forgiven for thinking these don't exist if your palate has been shaped by traditional western food that deems any spice in food as ethnic. But if you want to eat healthy but don't want to sacrifice on taste, you need to familiarize yourself with the hundreds of spices available that not only add great taste to your food, but also have additional life-saving properties.
Try adding spices, like turmeric, cumin, garam masala, paprika, chili powder, curry powder, cayenne pepper etc. It will be helpful to take a healthy eating cookbook then start experimenting. Start small and let your taste buds adapt. Soon you won't be able to believe how easy it is to start eating healthier while experiencing flavors that enchant you and bring your dining experience to whole another levels.
When you crave sugar try eating a fruit. The natural sugars in fruits will satiate your craving while the fibers in the fruits will make you feel full. Never replace eating fruits with fruits juices as the juiced form strips fruits of all the goodness to leave only the liquid sugary taste. If eating a fruit is messy or time consuming then another option is to make a smoothie with them that retains the entire fruit (except for the pits).
You can add several other healthy ingredients to a smoothie to turn it into a complete meal. Try experimenting with adding nut butters (get the ones whose only ingredient is the nut itself and has no added sugar or other artificial additives), seeds (chia seed, hemp seed etc) that add a lot of healthy fat and protein, nut based milk, like almond or coconut milk to add more liquid to make it easily drinkable, spinach or kale for their green goodness, and protein powder for extra protein. These smoothies made this way are very easy to make, easy to consume or bring with you anywhere, and also super tasty and not to mention loaded with nutrients to make you healthy.
Here's to seeing food in a new light.
