If you’re looking to make a healthy habit stick, then one of the best ways you can do it is to make sure that it doesn’t take quite as much effort. If your idea of changing your diet means suddenly doing calculations in the middle of the grocery store or living only off of juices or teas for the next few weeks, it should be no surprise if you find that your effort levels balloon up and down. Making meaningful changes to your diet does not have to be a gargantuan effort. Here are a few ways you can make it a little easier.

Know your reasons

First and foremost, any “diet” that is not a permanent change to your eating habits should be considered a temporary tool to help you get where you want to go. To that end, you have to make sure that you know where you want to go. If you’re looking to lose weight, then calorie control is going to be a big part of your diet. If you’re trying to bulk, then healthy proteins and other muscle-building nutrients will take center stage. Set a goal with your diet so that any challenges you face within it are finite and, thus, easier to deal with.

Know what to get rid of

When you’re trying to think of what to eliminate from your diet, it’s best to keep it simple. You don’t have to start scrutinizing every single little thing. The big bands of the modern diet are mostly pretty simple to identify: high-fat, high-sugar foods, especially those that are heavily processed. Most of this stuff, we already know is plenty bad for us, be it chips, chocolate, cake, soda, and more. In fact, for a lot of people, the single biggest offender is soda. Drinking that stuff can wreak havoc on the body from the amount of sugar that it contains alone. You don’t need to go digging through your diet for every potential negative aspect of the foods you’re eating when you’re eliminating these much bigger and more important targets.

Make it easy to pick a meal

One of the big problems with diets is that suddenly finding yourself switching to and having to make a much wider range of meals can take a lot of energy and effort. At some point, it’s no surprise that people throw up their hands, give up, and simply go back to eating the way that they were before. To that end, you might want to look at the options that make it a lot easier to pick out a meal and enjoy it. For instance, if you’re looking to control your calories while ensuring good nutrition, healthy protein shakes can serve as great meal replacements that get you ready for the gym. Of course, becoming a more adept cook is a good long-term goal, as well.

Track your food choices

Standing in line at the grocery store, trying to work out all of the macros and micros of your shopping basket is a big ask for anyone to do. However, it is a good idea to know the nutritional value of what you’re eating every day. But perhaps the better way to do that is to enlist the help of a tool that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. With the help of meal tracking apps, not only can you get a good idea of how many calories you’re both eating and burning every day, but you can also see what nutritional values you might fall short on, or what you might be eating too much of. You don’t have to develop an intimate knowledge of the nutritional makeup of everything that you eat, but you will start to get a good idea of which eating habits aren’t doing you any good.

Allow for cheat days

There’s a rule that a lot of people with healthy diets follow, and that is known as the 80/20 approach. Basically, this means that 80% of your diet should be dedicated to the healthy, nutritious, and goal-oriented foods that are going to help you reach the goal that you have in mind. However, the other 20% is left to eat the way that you want to. Some people make it a cheat day to treat themselves, but even restricting it to one day alone might feel overly restrictive for some. You want to avoid being overly restrictive, as it is the leading cause of failed diets and serious binges.

Always be mindful of fad diets

This isn’t to say that there’s no chance anyone in the future will come up with a handy and useful diet that suddenly gains popularity. However, any time you see a diet becoming viral, always treat it with a grain of salt, especially if it seems overly restrictive. For one, don’t believe any outrageous hype about the benefits until it has the time to spread more widely and secondly, it takes a longer time for any potential negative health consequences to become known.

Consider working with a professional

The main reason that a lot of people don’t start working with a personal trainer is that they aren’t committed to making that investment. What if you spend the money and it doesn’t work? However, making that commitment alone is a lot more likely to make you successful, since you’re investing in it and thus more likely to want to get your money’s worth out of it. Even if you can’t get the 1-to-1 attention of a personal trainer, there are meal planners you can enlist online to help you stay on top of your diet and do a lot of the thinking for you.

How you can make your diet easier will, of course, depend in large part on what your objectives are. Whatever methods you’re trying, try not to get too far away from the reason you’re doing it in the first place.

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