A healthy diet is an important cornerstone of good health, but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. Along with exercise and stress management, healthy eating reduces your risk of lifestyle diseases and helps manage health conditions.

Healthy eating while you’re away from home and on the go can pose unique challenges. You may be tempted to skip meals. It may also be hard to find out where to purchase nutritious foods, decide what you should pack in your lunch bag, and determine how to maintain a balanced meal while eating out.

🥬 The Basics Of Healthy Eating:

To eat healthy, you need to get a variety of nutrients from the five food groups — dairy, protein-rich foods, grains, fruits, and vegetables.

Examples of foods from each group are:
▪️Dairy: milk, cheese, yogurt, lactose-free milk, fortified soy milk
▪️Protein-rich foods: seafood, meat, poultry, eggs, peas, beans, nuts, seeds, and soy products
▪️Grains: wheat, rice, oats, cornmeal, barley
▪️Fruits: fresh, canned, frozen, or dried fruits and 100% fruit juice
▪️Vegetables (nonstarchy): fresh, canned, frozen, or dried vegetables (raw or cooked) and 100% vegetable juice

➖How To Fill Your Plate For A Healthy Meal:
▪️Fill half of your plate with nonstarchy vegetables like spinach or collard greens.
▪️Then, fill one-fourth of your plate with protein-rich foods, such as chicken, fish, or navy beans, depending on your preferences.
▪️Lastly, fill the remaining one-fourth of your plate with grains like rice or quinoa.

➖Healthy Snacks: Pair a grain with a protein-, fat-, or fiber-rich food. Your body digests mixed meals that include protein, healthy fats, and fiber more slowly than grains alone. This makes you feel full for longer, which can help support a healthy weight and blood sugar management.

➖How Skipping Meals Can Backfire: It’s not unhealthy in itself, but skipping meals can backfire, causing you to be ravenous later so that you overeat at your next meal or load up on unhealthy snacks. We’re often not great at making healthy diet decisions when we’re hungry.