How To Eat Healthy: 10 Rules To Follow
- Jack Reitnour
- May 28
- 6 min read
Summary: (the 10 rules)
Read the ingredients, not just the calories.
Check the serving size; the whole bag is rarely just one serving.
If sugar is in the first three ingredients, skip it.
Prioritize whole foods over processed ones.
Don’t drink your calories.
Watch the sodium, especially considering serving sizes (rule #2).
Enjoy your food and try to eat slowly.
Make room for treats -- just not every day.
Know what the buzzword labels actually mean. (organic, low-fat, etc.)
Don’t grocery shop hungry.
Let's Expand On The Rules:
Read the ingredients, not just the calories.
Not all calories are the same. Some are more artificial than others and those are the ones to watch out for. It's also important to note that the preservatives and additives may be more harmful than just the sheer quantity of calories in a product.
Xanthan gum and citric acid are found in most products on the shelves. They help with texture (xanthan gum) and longer shelf life (citric acid). Overconsumption of these ingredients can impact your gut health and when they are found in most packaged foods, it's tough to avoid them.
Following rule #4 further down, preservatives and additives are often found in ultra-processed foods and should be avoided as those ingredients can quickly be over-consumed if found in most products you buy. The easy rule is if you can pronounce it, you're good to go, if you can't, you may want to look into what the ingredient is.
Check the serving size; the whole bag is rarely just one serving.
Some brands now show on their nutrition labels the amount per serving and amount per bag which is a good practice when there are a lot of servings in a bag that is likely to be consumed in one sitting.
However, most don’t do the double nutrition label and this can be misleading for consumers, especially when the serving size is significantly under what the consumer will actually be having.
Taco seasonings are a great example. Most packets say 1 serving is 2 tsp and there are about 5 servings in each pouch. If sodium per serving is 280mg, you'll need to multiply that by 5 to see that there is 1,400mg of sodium in that packet. Given that you won't have the entire packet in one sitting unless you eat a whole pound of ground beef/chicken, you are likely having more than 2 tsp worth in your tacos.
When all brands do their nutrition labels this way, it leads to overconsumption of some nutrients and chronic issues down the line because it's little amounts everywhere.
If sugar is in the first three ingredients, skip it.
Ingredient lists on nutrition labels are required to be in descending order by the amount of each ingredient in the product. That means the first ingredient has the largest percentage of all the ingredients, the second would be the second highest and so on.
If sugar is in the top 3 ingredients, the odds are that the product tastes good because it's loaded with sugar and not much else. Look at the cereal, Froot Loops, for example. Their first ingredient is sugar. That means that there's more sugar by weight than any other single ingredient in that package.
Prioritize whole foods over processed ones.
Minimally processed foods are ok. Minimally is the key word here though. Think of dehydrated forms of ingredients like powders or a process you can do by hand if you wanted to and get the same result; that is minimally processed foods.
Regularly or highly processed foods are things like deli meat, fast food, breakfast cereals and packaged treats. These involve heavy machines to do the work, changing the state of certain ingredients to make the final product. Often, they overuse ingredients that were already processed before getting added into the new product.
The rank to follow for processed foods is this:
1.) whole foods
2.) minimally processed food
3.) processed foods (avoid when possible)
4.) ultra-processed foods (avoid always)
Don’t drink your calories.
Most cocktails have anywhere from 150-300 calories in each drink. If you're having 3-4 drinks in a sitting, you just drank an entire meals worth of calories.
Let's say you don't drink alcohol but enjoy a nice soda or sweet tea; most sodas and teas have 150+ calories and 30-40 grams of sugar. The daily recommended value of sugar is 50 grams per day. That means one 12oz soda is almost putting you at your limit for the entire day.
Watch the sodium, especially considering serving sizes (rule #2)
The recommended daily sodium intake is 2,300mg; ideally it is 1,500mg. Do you know what most Americans have daily? 3,500mg!!
Many packages overdo the salt and then hide it with a smaller serving size which is part of the reason why we have so much salt in our diets. The other is that eating out at restaurants contributes to this significantly since they all add loads of salt to their dishes to enhance the flavor.
When trying to reign in the salt intake, first look at what the sodium levels are per serving; they should be around 15% of the DV or less, and then multiply how many servings you typically have. Make sure this is in a normal range and then see how much of that product you have daily to get an estimate of how much a single product is impacting your sodium levels. This will also help you see what you can cut out altogether or maybe start making at home to cut back on the salt intake.
Enjoy your food and try to eat slowly.
By eating slowing and chewing your food fully, it allows your body enough time to process the food and extract the proper nutrients. You will also give your body enough time to tell you when it's full so you don't overeat.
Eating slowly also makes your tastebuds happy since they will get excitement from all the flavors they get to interact with instead of just a second or two before it's down the hatch.
Make room for treats -- just not every day.
A sweet treat is totally fine and actually encouraged if it helps you live a balanced diet. If you skip out on a little dessert at the end of the day but are replacing it with chips and junk food snacking throughout the day; it's a worse result in a bad disguise.
To follow the saying "everything in moderation", it's important to allow yourself a treat but just be careful to not over do it. If you're having a chocolate piece of cake every night after dinner, it'd be fair to argue that is overdoing it but if you had a little ice cream on Sundays to end the week, that would be fair and realistic.
Similarly, having small treats is ok on a daily basis but sitting down every night with bags of candy may be overdoing it a bit. Just be realistic with yourself on what is realistic and what is excessive.
Know what the buzzword labels actually mean. (organic, low-fat, etc.)
Many brands have these key certifications or approvals about their product and they are truly great! It helps distinguish the bad from the better but better doesn't always mean great.
Low-____ typically means you can eat multiple servings of the product without concern of going over the daily recommended limit for a specific nutrition category.
To qualify for the "low-fat" label, 3 g or less of fat per serving is needed.
To qualify for the "organic" label, 95 percent must be organic ingredients.
"100% organic" is 100% all organic ingredients.
Don’t grocery shop hungry.
The classic "your eyes are bigger than your stomach" is true.
When you're hungry, you more often crave the sugary, fatty and greasy foods so you are more likely to grab that candy for later or that bag of chips you try to avoid if you're shopping on an empty stomach.
Everything looks good when you're hungry so you'll also likely end up buying more than you need and if it's junk food, you're stocking up in the wrong category.
Next Steps:
There is no need to memorize these rules. If you apply 2-3 of them, you'll already be significantly better off than most of the population. The important thing is awareness and understanding what you're buying versus what the brand is selling. They should always align but sometimes there are some tricks brands use to make their product more appealing. Furthermore, everyone is different so diets will most certainly vary person-to-person.
Whether you're vegan, following the paleo or carnivore diet or just trying to balance all foods properly, there are guidelines everyone can follow to maintain a balanced lifestyle. The key is not that you have to follow one, two or ten rules; the key is reading up on the benefits and drawbacks of the foods you eat and make the choices that are best for you.
If some of these rules help you find that perfect path, then voilà, we are now taking the right steps to a more balanced lifestyle and a more knowledgable diet. So....how to eat healthy with the 10 rules to follow....they are helpful to use when deciding what is right for you but at the end of the day, just always look out for yourself and your health when considering a new brand and check what ingredients they use and how much of each. From there, it has been and always will be your decision to make!
-- Dried & True
Learn more from the articles we used to inform this blog:
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