Everybody wants to eat healthily but most people don’t, not because they are too lazy to discipline themselves to do so but because they just don’t know how. Many have tried to eat healthily but after a short while they seem to regress, and it is still for the same reason of not knowing how to eat healthily. To help with this, Jumia Food, Nigeria’s no. 1 online food ordering platform, shares 4 surprising tips for healthy eating.

Eat what you want

Surprising right? But you can totally eat what you want when intending to eat healthily, the only thing that really matters is ‘portion’. Every food has benefits and detriments, meaning there is no food that is well-prepared or packaged that is completely bad for you, it always has a benefit or two. However, some foods should be taken in moderation because taking them liberally will ultimately be bad for your body and end up frustrating your intention to eat healthily. You can also think of it this way – 80% of the time you should eat healthily while the remaining 20% of the time you can eat whatever you want in moderation.

Don’t have cheat days

Having cheat days unconsciously makes you develop a diet mentality that can be detrimental to your healthy eating plans. Healthy eating should be a lifestyle, something you do because it makes you feel good about yourself and is good for your body and well-being. It should not be a diet thing and as a result, you don’t have to have ‘cheat days’. As explained above, there is no food that is in itself bad for you (as long as it is well washed, prepared, packaged etc.), what matters is just the quantity. If you must take something sugary, simply take it in moderation, you don’t have to wait for a ‘cheat day’. Cheat days can really be very counterproductive and the main reason for this is that they encourage indulgence because you tend to ‘overdo it’ on these days since you’re more prone to shun the concept of healthy eating.

Focus more on ‘abundance’ than ‘restriction’

Rather than focusing on what you should not be eating, it is more productive to focus on what you should be eating. This ‘abundance’ mentality will make it easier for you to adjust to eating healthily than the ‘restriction’ mentality. For example, rather than obsessing on not being able to eat this or that because of this or that, focus more on the things you can or should be eating or eating more of, which include – proteins, fibre etc.

Understand the need to boost your activity

The reason why, as humans, we have so many joints in our body is because we were created to move. No matter how healthily you eat, if you are not active, eating healthily will do little for you. You simply need to move your body. Working out is one way to do so but it is not the only way - this one thing most people fail to understand. There are many people that lose weight or keep fit without necessarily working out because they move around a lot, they don’t live a sedentary life. If you simply become more active in your daily life, you might not even need to work out or rather your activity can easily become your work out.