• Planning Ahead Of Time

Planning your weekly menu with all your main meals, snacks and even desserts will help you make wholesome food choice and avoid food waste. It can be difficult to stick to a fully planned weekly menu 100% of the time, but having a rough idea planned out can help you consume more healthier meal and snack options. This also works well if you have kids. You can plan out healthy meal items for the whole family.

Once you have created your weekly plan, you can jot down a suitable grocery list which will help you purchase more wholesome food and prevent you from purchasing less nutrient dense food. This will also help you stick to a budget. Planning ahead of time will help you stay organized and will help prevent decision fatigue and will provide a nutrient dense diet to support your overall health and wellbeing.

• Keeping Food Fresh For Longer

We are always trying to keep our fruits and veggies fresh for long as possible without losing the nutrients of these foods. Heat, light and oxygen are the three main factors that can affect the nutrition composition of fruits and vegetables.  To help keep vegetables fresh and crunchy, cut it up and store them in a glass container with water. Fruits can be chopped up in bulk and kept frozen to preserve the fruit and its nutrients.

Sometimes exposure to oxygen can affect the amount of vitamin C and vitamin E in these foods. However, eating fruits and vegetables with slightly reduced amounts of these nutrients are still beneficial as they contain fibre, B vitamins and minerals, which are still wholesome and can support your overall health and wellbeing.

• Meal Prepping

Meal prepping can be done with juice and smoothies where you add in chopped up fruit, vegetables and other ingredients into small jars stored in the fridge, which can be easily whipped up in a blender and served up quickly without the hassle of cutting and chopping food every day. This will save time and effort.

Overnight oats are another easy breakfast option that can be meal prepped the night before or prepared for 2 days in advance to provide a healthy and wholesome breakfast option every day.

Cutting, peeling and chopping up vegetables can make it easy to prepare each day. You can save time with preparation and use these vegetables to prepare a soup, add it into pasta, fried rice, vegetable curries instantly. You can also steam or roast a large batch of vegetables that can be stored in the fridge and eaten up to 2-3 days which is another way of saving time and effort to help you eat a wholesome healthy diet.

• Making Snacks More Available To Us

Having healthy snacks available to us and within our reach by placing them in convenient places in the pantry, fridge, study room, office can be beneficial. If we see these healthy snack items more often and if they are the first thing in sight, we are more likely to grab these foods than to keep hunting for other food items.

Healthy snacks to keep available and accessible to you at all times;

– Bran crackers

– Low fat yoghurt

– Peanut butter

– Dates

– Mixed nuts

– Popcorn

– Chopped up fresh fruits

• Increasing Antioxidants In Our Diet

Incorporating fresh fruit at least twice a day will provide antioxidants and flavonoids to help support your immune system and even reduce the risk of developing chronic diseases.  Ensure you’re alternating the fruits each week to help you eat fruits of different colours to obtain a range of phytochemicals that have anti-inflammatory properties. Additionally, adding herbs and spices to meals will boost antioxidant intake in your diet. Adding cloves, cinnamon, turmeric, oregano, fennel seeds etc. can double up the antioxidant level of your meals as well as add a pleasant aroma and flavor to your food. Adding herbs and spices to all your meals will also help you reduce the amount of excess oil and salt added into foods, which will support your overall health and wellbeing.

Eating a healthy well-balanced diet doesn’t have to be difficult. Try to follow some of these food hacks to help you sustain a wholesome healthy diet with ease and minimal effort.