Eating for a lean, hard-body appearance needn’t be expensive or complicated. However, it does take some forward planning, so that you know what foods are best for you. They can be incorporated into your daily diet as snacks, and ingredients in your three main meals of the day.
If you are keen to eat more healthily, but find you are too busy to cook from scratch on a daily basis, you might benefit from making use of meal prep services. They can prep weekly or monthly bundles on your behalf, and give you the flexibility to specify your own bespoke bundles.
When shopping for yourself, remember, if you don’t have junk such as crisps, biscuits and cakes in your cupboards, you won’t eat junk! So, make the right choices at the store and don’t give into those tempting treats. Here are some ideas about what to buy instead. They are healthy and nutritious, but that doesn’t have to mean tasteless and dull.
Include plenty of fruit and veg
The first rule of healthy eating: you can never eat enough fruit and vegetables. Local is best for the freshest produce, during the growing season at least, and the more varieties the better. Useful vegetables to buy include onions, spinach, mushrooms, courgettes, peppers, and broccoli.
Avocados are a brilliant versatile food that you can add to anything and are packed with good fats and fibre. Good basic fruits include bananas, apples, oranges, pears, and peaches. There are plenty of more exotic choices too: papaya, mangoes, and star fruit to name a few. Also, don’t forget about berries which are dense in nutrients and antioxidants.
Don’t ignore eggs!
Eggs are an excellent source of nutrition. Some people just use the whites because they think the yolks are high in harmful cholesterol, but this is nonsense. Not all cholesterol is bad, and the yolk is dense with nutrients. Free range organic eggs are of the best quality.
Nuts are excellent snack food
Nuts are a nutritious snack that will keep you full, so stock up your cupboard with them as an alternative to crisps and biscuits. Good varieties to try include walnuts and almonds. Raw nuts are best, as the roasting process can make the polyunsaturated fats more harmful, but overall nuts contain healthy fat.
Don’t be scared of butter and cheese
Don’t avoid cheeses: cottage and ricotta cheese are useful ingredients with healthy fats. Also good are swiss and goat cheese, preferably grass-fed if you can find it. If you are still not convinced, try plain yogurt as an alternative. The same goes for butter; it is a healthy food as long as you keep the quantities small because it is high in calories.
Choose meat and fish carefully
Fish is an excellent food, but make sure that you avoid farmed fish, as it is much lower in omega-3 to omega-6 balance, amongst other drawbacks. Chicken is another good lean food, especially free-range corn-fed ranges. For steaks, burgers and ground beef, always choose the grass-fed variety as they have higher levels of omega-3 fatty acids.