How to keep your meals interesting

How many of you have made resolutions to eat healthy, and then given up because making ‘diet food’ is just…too…hard? You either spend a fortune trying to buy healthier ingredients you spend a lot more time cooking, or you end up eating the same three dishes over and over and over. Boredom can be the biggest of the three turnoffs, and can often lead to a binge splurge as a reaction! However, all those problems are easily overcome, and we’re going to focus today on how to keep your food interesting while living healthy and shedding weight.

Make a food plan

Sit down at the beginning of the week and spend 20 minutes or so planning out the meals you’re going to make. This lets you see if there’s any repetition, gives you time to Google interesting recipes, and makes grocery shopping an absolute breeze later! You also get to make sure that you’re getting the right amount of fruits, veggies, carbs and protein every day, instead of just grabbing whatever seems ‘healthy’ and available on the fly.

Search for new recipes online

We often fall into a recipe rut. Be willing to experiment! For example, if you’re having the same two salads over and over, you’re going to hate them after a while. Look at what you have available in the house, and then search online for salad recipes with those ingredients. You’ll discover great new stuff! Learning to make different kinds of accompaniments, like sauces and dressings, will also be a HUGE help – making the same dressing all the time can literally make everything you eat taste the same. Dressings and sauces are generally easy to make, and updating your recipe book every few weeks will make a huge difference.

Collect other people’s healthy recipes

You often learn the best recipes by eating over in someone else’s house, or just asking them for their favourite go-to healthy recipe! Talk to your friends, tell them you’re trying to eat better on a time and money budget, and ask them for their favourite recipes. You’ll learn so much more and your food will be incredibly interesting. This is especially true if you have a ‘mixed bag’ of friends from different countries! You’ll learn to make the simplest, tastiest recipes from a variety of places, and soon be chowing down on daal-rice, spanish omelettes, and Mexican bean salad.

Don’t repeat a dish more than once a week

If you’ve had pasta with red sauce this week, freeze your leftover sauce and don’t eat any more of it till next week! You’ll enjoy it more the next time you eat it, take our word on it. When you make your meal plan, try and make sure you’re eating something new each day. Once you expand your mental easy-recipe database by following the two points above, this will be a breeze!

So there you go! We hope we helped make your eating-healthy resolution easier!