Dr. Foodle sees it all the time; people trying to eat healthy but not getting the results they’re looking for. Eating healthy isn’t hard to do, but you really need to pay attention to each aspect of your meal to ensure your food is doing your body good. Below are the top mistakes people make when trying to switch to a healthy diet.

5. Store Bought Salad Dressings

Salads can be extremely healthy meals that are nutritionally dense, and salad dressings can make a vegetable medley taste delicious, but your favorite store-bought dressings are hiding a ton of fats and sugars. A typical serving of store bought Caesar dressing is mostly fat and sugar and contains no nutritional benefits at all. Even healthier looking options like balsamic dressings are full of sugar. The best option is to make your own salad dressings, and Dr. Foodle will be exploring how to do that in a later article.

4. Over-Cooking Foods

Cooking veggies is a sure-fire way to make them softer and more pleasant to eat. However, studies have shown that cooking your veggies for long periods of time will remove a ton of vitamins and minerals from your favorite veggies. Some foods, like broccoli, actually lose the majority of their nutritional density. While it’s fine to have cooked veggies as a side with a nice meal, think about throwing back a few raw veggies if you want the full nutritional punch.

3. Adding Sugar to Your Favorite Drinks and Foods

Adding a couple of spoonfuls of sugar to coffee, tea, or foods is a common practice for many, but it’s not doing your body any favors. Adding refined sugar into tea and coffee, both drinks that have medicinal benefits, will actually make a healthy drink unhealthy. Try taking your coffee or tea without any sugar, and those stubborn pounds will certainly shed away.

2. Choosing Bigger Portions

Moderation and balance are truly the keys to a happy and healthy life. For many people, they choose to go for the bigger portion and throw moderation and balance out of the window. Any type of food in large, excessive amounts just isn’t good for you. All foods contain calories and your body can process only so many calories at a time. If you’re choosing the largest portion all the time, it doesn’t matter what you’re eating; those excess calories will just turn into fat. By regulating your portion sizes, not only will you achieve the results you’re looking for, but you’ll able to eat small amounts of food that you love.

1. Adding Unnecessary Elements to Your Meals

Keep your cooking simple. Try to limit the amount of ingredients you use,and always ask if that ingredient is essential to the recipe. This will have a twofold effect: it will make your food better tasting and healthier. The best restaurants in the world focus on ingredients, not complexities. There’s nothing wrong with having a
burger, but adding bacon, cheese, condiments, pickles, BBQ sauce, etc. is overloading the burger with unnecessary ingredients. These ingredients are turning into empty calories in your stomach, risking your health and detracting and distracting from the taste of the burger.