Finding healthy strategies that are actually sustainable can be a challenge. How many times have you tried to drink more water, exercise more, or eat more vegetables but just can’t seem to stick with it? The first (and most important) step is that you must test drive new healthy changes to find the ones that are right for you. Don’t commit right away! Find changes that work with the strengths of your personality, and also help keep your weaknesses in check.

Everyone falls on the spectrum somewhere between a type-A (numbers, details, budgets, lists, organization) and a type-B (free spirit, go-with-the-flow) personality. Someone on the more extreme end of the type-A spectrum might be very good at self-discipline. Too good, in fact. If they choose a very detailed, overcomplicated-because-they-love-control method of keeping their food in check, they may tend to become obsessive. They track grams of carbs, proteins, and fat, and monitor every calorie down to the very last crumb. They thrive on this control until one day – whoops – we pass over healthy and slide down that slippery slope into disordered eating. Eating is no longer fun but a competition. A highly structured eating plan may not be a good idea for someone who is ALL the way at the type-A end of the spectrum.

Let’s try the other end of the spectrum. An extreme type-B may avoid the control of number-tracking like the plague, so they go for a much more flexible method. Too flexible, in fact. So flexible that they free-spirit their way in the opposite direction of their goals. Their personality is so extremely type B that they need a more structured (but not overly restrictive or controlling) method if they’re going to get anywhere. They just need a little more accountability.

In reality, most people do not fall at either extreme but instead somewhere in the middle. When you’re in the middle, you have some of the strengths of each personality and possibly some of the weaknesses too. No matter where you are on the spectrum, it takes a little honest introspection to know which might be some of the best approaches for you.

Use this flowchart to help you decide which strategies might work well for you:

Daily Food Group Checklist

Using a daily food group checklist can help you make sure you’re getting a wide variety of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, vitamins, minerals, and fiber in the right amounts, but without the detail of a food tracker. Visit this website to calculate your daily needs and get a list of your personalized daily goals for each food group. Make a simple checklist or tally mark for each group each day so you can meet your goals without too much time investment.

Healthy Meal Plan

While I’m not a huge fan of meal plans made by people other than you, getting into the habit of making your own regular meal plan is a great way to set yourself up for success. If you already have the plan and the ingredients (possibly prepped and ready to go!), you are much more likely to eat more healthfully than if you were playing it by ear. Check out this post for a step-by-step guide and free printable to help make meal planning simple and easy.

Food Trackers

Food trackers are some of the most detail-oriented options for providing structure, accountability, and awareness. They can be as simple as a food journal with pen and paper or as complex as some websites and apps that have barcode scanners and track your calories, macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals. While these tech marvels are nifty, they have their pros and cons, so make sure to test it out first to see if it’s a good fit for you. This post has some reviews of apps and websites to help you create healthy habits. One important thing to remember for tracking: it’s a tool for you, not a rule you must follow. Only track for as long as and to the extent that it is useful and helpful to you – and absolutely no farther! Most of my clients end up settling in to a routine of tracking every other week or a few days a week. Tracking every day forever is pretty exhausting!

MyPlate

MyPlate is the visual put forth by the USDA to provide nutrition recommendations, and it replaced the Food Guide Pyramid in 2010.

Personally, I feel that MyPlate is much more user-friendly, since it does away with memorizing portion sizes and numbers of portions. Instead, it provides a evenly divided plate that builds in a bunch of nutrition recommendations in (so you never have to think about them!). It balances your carbs, proteins, and fats, while helping ensure you are meeting vitamin, mineral, and fiber goals. And you can do this anywhere – you can hit every food group at a fast food restaurant, mini mart, grocery store, or in a packed lunch. It’s so simple my kids have been doing it for years! Just take this mental picture with you and try to make as many of your meals (especially lunches and dinners) resemble MyPlate as possible. A good rule of thumb for breakfast? Include at least 3 different food groups and make one of them protein. You can read about my experience following a MyPlate plan, as well as some of my tips for following it starting with this post.

Intuitive Eating

This is a method of allowing your body’s hunger and fullness signals to guide what you eat. Often this begins by practicing mindfulness of your body’s cues. This approach helps separate moral feelings (like guilt or pride) from simply honoring your body’s needs for fuel. You can read more about intuitive eating here.

Hopefully these guides and resources help you find the best healthy changes to test drive for your life. Let me know if you have other ideas of healthy changes, or which strategies have worked the best for you!

Related Articles

The #1 Thing You Must Do to Save Time Living a Healthy Life

Save Time with 5 Healthy Convenience Foods

To Diet or Not to Diet: 5 Ways to Know if an Eating Plan is Right for You

Want a hint? It doesn’t look like this:

Okay, here comes my first video! Editing is bad and trying to find a better video editor put me a day late (and still didn’t fix it), but I’ll get better!

Want to learn more about carbohydrates? Check out my post here.

Need some ideas of foods high in protein? Here ya go!

Healthful Protein Foods

Beans/Peas

Nuts/Seeds (includes peanut butter/almond butter/etc)

Skinless chicken and lean turkey

Lean cuts of beef and pork (look for loin, leg, and round in the name)

Low-fat dairy products

Plant-based protein products like tofu, tempeh, seitan, etc.

Well, late is better than never, right?

The Good: Once I started using recipes and eating more fruit life got a lot better. My blood pressure even dropped back down to 107 (lower than normal)/86 (better, but still higher than normal). During the first week I had tried to avoid using my three allotted non-paleo meals in order to stay true to the diet and “get the full experience.” But later on careful usage of my non-paleo meals helped me to participate in enough social situations to keep this extrovert functional during the last two weeks.

Also, I lost weight over the first two weeks, so if that would have been a goal, this diet did the trick…until week three when I started gaining weight. Interesting turn of events, actually, because though my average calorie and carbohydrate intakes increased minimally in the last week, it was not by a considerable amount.

Finally, my favorite thing about paleo is that it forces you to eat real food. Nothing processed, nothing artificial. Definitely more nutritious than pretty much anything you can buy pre-made.

The Bad: Eating paleo took up a LOT of time, which is what you would expect on a “real food” diet. Every meal had to be made from scratch, which is great but definitely packs on hours in the kitchen. My bro and sis-in-law can vouch for the fact that I was in their kitchen for 3-4 hours three times per week cooking. That’s a lot of prep time for a single gal working full time and driving all over western Washington every week; hence, my sparse blogging during my paleo diet. I made a paleo pizza for which I had to make the crust (out of cauliflower), the sauce (from home-canned tomatoes), and the cheese (out of macadamia nuts, believe it or not) completely from scratch to meet the diet restrictions. The one recipe took 2 1/2 hours! And it certainly didn’t taste that great.

On top of the time it took, it was also very expensive. After the first week, a reader suggested that organic, locally-grown, and in-season produce and grass-fed meat was the true “paleo” way to eat…so I adopted that for the last two weeks or so. It certainly is more “paleo,” though I don’t suppose the hunter-gatherers had to pay twice their normal grocery bill for it like I did.

The Ugly: My main beefs with the paleo diet are twofold (not counting the social impact I described here and here).

My first and main issue with the diet is that it entirely eliminates certain foods, creating a “bad food, good food” mentality. I can’t tell you how many people I explained my diet to over the last few weeks who said, “Boy, if you were to tell me there’s something I couldn’t have that’s all I would be able to think about eating.” Interestingly, I didn’t have that experience. In fact, I didn’t really have any cravings at all, I just kind of stopped enjoying food. But what I’m really getting at is the danger of the psychological game you start to play when you label and restrict specific foods as “bad.” It creates a fear of food that is a slippery slope to disordered eating.

I’ve even experienced this a little bit myself since I stopped eating paleo. When I eat foods that weren’t “allowed” on paleo my brain, if even for a second, tells me I’m not supposed to have it. I eat it anyway because I don’t truly believe that X food is inherently bad. But I can easily see how someone (and I know many who have done this) looking to lose weight or improve his or her health would try out different diets, being told that X food is bad, then Y food is bad, and yet another diet says that Z food is bad. Pretty soon in the back of your head your vegan experience tells you not to eat meat, your paleo and Atkins experience tells you not to eat carbs, and your low-fat diet’s got you afraid of every butter and oil under the sun. Now you’re left either afraid of everything but vegetables or throwing your hands up saying, “Screw it! I’m going to eat it all!” and fostering feelings of guilt and failure. For this, I have an issue with any diet that says certain foods (particularly lots of different foods) are “not allowed.” The benefits of a real food diet could certainly be achieved without eliminating entire food groups.

My second issue with paleo stems from this elimination of entire food groups. Each food group has its own strengths as far as the vitamins and minerals it provides. Let’s take calcium, for example. The first types of foods you think of when you think of calcium are probably dairy products. That’s because dairy products are the front-runners when it comes to calcium content. “Now listen crazy dietitian lady,” you may say, “there are certainly non-dairy sources of calcium!” And you would be right (at least about the calcium part, I’ll let you make your own judgements on crazy). Just check out this chart on calcium content put out by Harvard University Health Services. The problem is that several of these sources (molasses, soy nuts, tofu, fortified foods like soy milk or orange juice) aren’t allowed on paleo either. The good sources of calcium on this list that are included in paleo are artichokes, collard and turnip greens, sardines with bones, clams, and oysters. Boy, I don’t know about you, but those are not foods that make my meal plan every day. The kicker is that other paleo staples such as sweet potatoes, spinach, and almonds have high amounts of oxalic acid, which binds calcium and prevents its absorption. It certainly doesn’t mean one couldn’t meet their calcium (and other vitamin and mineral) needs on a paleo diet, but you’d have to make a concerted effort to do so.

In fact, many paleo websites encourage supplementation along with a paleo diet (though others say a paleo diet actually eliminates the need for such). This particular website discusses the top TEN different vitamin, mineral, and nutrient supplements to help you meet your needs on paleo. Granted, the author qualified these recommendations by saying that the need for them is due to the degradation of the nutrition provided in food by genetic modification and nutrient-depleted soil. That may be so, but regardless, that is what Americans have to work with today. Certainly the standard American diet is not nutrient-rich and is by no means a way I would recommend to eat, but I’m not yet convinced that cutting out lists of food types is the answer.

So, what’s next? Good question. I have decided that there is so much more unpacking to do in regards to paleo that I’m going to hang with it for a while. I won’t be following it anymore (I know, so surprising) but I have a lot of research I still want to do. If you have specific questions about paleo, let me know in the comments section so I can address them in the next few weeks. In the meantime, I’ll hang up my apron, pull out my reading glasses, and get to work.

Weight change: -2 pounds from last week (loss of 1 pound since beginning of MyPlate diet)

Total cost of groceries: $52. I made a big shopping trip last week with the hope that the groceries will carry me into this week, and it’s looking like they are going to.

Average daily intakes (7 days)*:

• Total calories (goal=2,000): 2075
• Net calories (after subtracting exercise): 2029 (I know, I know…I didn’t do very much exercise this week)
• Carbohydrates (goal=45-65% calories): 260 g (50% calories)
• Protein (goal=10-35% calories): 65 g (13% calories)
• Total fat (goal=20-35% calories): 66 g (29% calories)
• Saturated fat (goal=less than 10% calories): 19 g (8% calories)
• Sodium (goal=2300 mg or less): 2439 mg
• Fiber (goal=more than 25 g): 25 g

# of days food group guidelines were met: SIX! Much improved from last week. I made much more of a focus of getting all of my food groups in this week.

The good: Working on getting food groups in changed my focus from what I couldn’t have to what I could. I like foods from all of the food groups, so it was a treat to look at what was left on my checklist to get in for each day. Calories stopped controlling my meal intakes, because (somehow…almost like magic) if I focused on getting the right amount of each of the food groups, I ended up pretty darn close to my calorie goal for the day. Go figure! It’s like they did the math or something.

The bad: I’m starting to feel a little bit of the weariness of tracking everything I eat. It’s funny how when I meet with my clients once a week, and they get tired of tracking their food after only two meetings it feels to me as though they’ve given up so quickly. But now that I’m tracking, it feels like I’ve been tracking my food for twoooooo loooooooooong weeks. Puts a little perspective on it…I apologize to my clients for my naivety!

The ugly: That stinkin’ sodium! My average is only 139 mg over my daily goal, but you should have seen the individual numbers. My lowest day was in the 1,600s, but my highest was in the 4,000s! I’ve always told patients that sodium is tough to keep in check, but I had no clue how tough. Personally, I’m a salt-lover and I would eat a whole bag of tortilla chips with a jar of salsa if left unattended for long enough. I figured that my regular, pre-MyPlate sodium intakes would likely have been off the charts, but I expected once I was following the diet, eating more fresh produce, and cooking more often that it would fall in line. Drat.

*Intakes are rounded 7-day averages. The percentages will not add up to 100%.

First of all, I would love to shout a huge CONGRATULATIONS to the Seattle Seahawks for an epically awesome Super Bowl win! I had a heck of a great time watching them all season.

This particular game, in typical Super Bowl fashion, was watched by me at a party at my brother and sister-in-law’s house. With food. And drink. Lots of it. So I wanted to have a game plan. Here’s the play-by-play:

1. Ask my bro what’s on the menu. I found out it was pretty much going to be meat, meat, and more meat.
2. Ask my bro if I can bring something, and choose strategically. Since I knew what would be there I also knew what would not: fruit, veggies, dairy, and whole grains. I opted to bring a fruit salad so I would have an option for that food group. I also got sneaky and asked my mom to bring a veggie tray so I could get those in too.
3. Think ahead. I knew where my weak points would be during the game (lunch and dinner times), so I targeted those at breakfast to get me started. One of Charlie and my favorite places to eat in Seattle is the Crumpet Shop, and he always gets a crumpet with ricotta cheese and orange marmalade. I replicated that with whole wheat English muffins, ricotta cheese, and some homemade peach jam. I topped that off with a fruit smoothie with 1 cup berries, 1/2 cup Greek yogurt, 1/2 cup milk, and 1 cup spinach. This yummy breakfast started me off with 2 oz of whole grains, 1 1/2 cups dairy, 1 cup fruit, and 1/2 cup vegetables – all of the groups I knew would be tough to get at the party. Though I used some Greek yogurt and dairy to get protein in this breakfast, I avoided meat and eggs because I knew there would be loads of protein at the party later.
4. Scope out the goods and make a plan. The smorgasboard consisted of meatballs, chicken wings, chili, veggie tray, fruit salad, (whole grain!) chips with dip, pizza, chocolate chip banana bread, and a variety of beverage. I was actually able to follow MyPlate pretty well for the lunch half of the party (had to do it in two plates because they were small).
5. Relax and enjoy it. Don’t go crazy, but for Heaven’s sake, don’t deny yourself everything you want to eat. I’m a firm believer in the 80/20 rule: eat nutritiously 80% of the time, and the other 20% will help you balance it out. Later in the day, I had two pieces of pizza, some whole-grain chips, and a couple of ciders. I ended up with all of my food groups, 300 extra calories for the day, a Seahawks win and a huge smile on my face. And I don’t regret a thing. =)