Clean Eating Starts with Your Kitchen
Our Health Nut and Registered Dietitian, Molly Morgan, knows that clean eating begins even before you step outside your house – right in your kitchen, in fact! Molly shares some of her best tips for creating an environment that promotes clean eating success at home.
When it comes to cleaning up your eating routine and food choices, it is important to first take a good look at your own kitchen. Research links everything from plate size to where you keep and don’t keep food, to weight and consumption of healthy foods like fruit and vegetables.
Here are some tips to rethink your kitchen and take steps towards clean eating:
1) Declutter your kitchen: Research shows cluttered kitchens prompted people to eat more snack food than a kitchen that was organized and decluttered.
Clean eating tip: Take a look at your kitchen and find a new home (other than your counter) for items that are adding clutter like gadgets, containers, etc…
2) Refrigerator and cupboard placement: In your refrigerator and cupboards, relocate fruits, vegetables, and healthier choices to the most visible spots.
Cleaning eating tip: Say goodbye to the days of rotting fruits and vegetables in the crisper drawer! Move the fruits and vegetables up to eye level in your refrigerator; it can help boost your consumption of nutrient-rich fruits and vegetables.
3) Make it out of sight: When you open the cupboard and cookies or goodies are the first thing you see, you may be more tempted to reach for them.
Clean eating tip: It’s not that you can’t ever have goodies, just make them less tempting! Move goodies and sweets into hard to reach places or opaque containers to help keep them out of sight.
4) Choose smaller serving bowls and spoons: A study of nutrition professors found that they ate 54% more ice cream when they used bigger bowls and spoons.
Clean eating tip: Take a look at the size of your serving plates, bowls, and utensils! Downsizing them could help you to keep your food intake in check. For example, use lunch plates to serve all meals and skip the traditional oversized dinner plates.
5) Snack out of a single serve bowl or plate: When you snack out of a bag or box it makes it much more difficult to be mindful of your portion size.
Clean eating tip: Place a serving of a snack food into a bowl or onto a plate so you can keep track of how much you are eating. Even if you go back for seconds, at least you will be more mindful of how much food you had.
What steps have you taken to promote clean eating?
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