Getting on track toward a healthy diet can be a difficult journey, especially for someone who has never had a particularly healthy diet. Planning a nutrition guide can be a great first step toward improving health benefits, though it can be difficult to stick to this guide. If you’ve tried to get on a healthy diet but are finding it difficult, consider the following tips to make your transition easier and your nutrition guide more effective. 

1. Write it down 

Don’t just mentally picture how you think your nutrition guide should be. Writing down what your healthy diet should be will give you an idea of how you should be eating on a practical level, and will also allow you to compare nutritional content. Furthermore, more than just your initial nutrition guide, try writing down the foods that you actually do eat to compare with your guide. Though it may be difficult to stick to your actual nutrition guide initially, writing down what you eat may help you to trim off foods that you hadn’t considered, in exchange for the foods you had thought would be easy to cut out and weren’t. Comparing the nutrition guide and your actual eating habits may also help you see what you’re cooking and how to improve those habits to fit in with a healthy diet. 

2. Mix up your food groups 

Don’t try to cram three servings of fruit into a single meal. Mix up your food group servings so that at each meal you’re having a little bit of each group, up to the recommended amount. This will not only help you maintain a healthy diet but may treat you with foods you like while covering up foods you don’t appreciate as much. Furthermore, your body will better be able to absorb foods if you don’t overload your nutrition guide with whatever you happen to be deficient in at the moment, in favor of maintaining a constantly healthy diet. 

3. Find foods you like 

It can be hard to write a nutrition guide full of foods that you don’t like. Instead, search for ways of cooking your healthy diet foods in delicious ways so that your nutrition guide is chock full of foods that you actually want to eat. That way it will be far easier to stick to it, and may even encourage you into other healthy diet patterns and foods involving the same foods. Though you may think that you dislike some vegetables, a little research and food experimentation should provide you with all sorts of ways of preparing food that you’d never thought of, and can’t wait to eat.

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