A healthy life needs the best tips to make healthy meals. But sometimes it can be difficult to plan your meals. Here are some tips for making all your meals healthier.

Healthy food starts with better ingredients. When CookUnity chefs plan their meals, the sourcing of ingredients is highly considered. This includes meat, fish, produce, and dairy because every component of the meal matters when you’re trying to make all your meals healthier. We go through a checklist of standards which we stand by with integrity because we know that eating healthy food on a daily basis means living a healthier life overall.

First, let’s talk about the challenges of making healthy meals for yourself on a consistent basis. We’ve come up with a list of what we hear the most common roadblocks are.

Challenges:

• Not enough time to grocery shop
• Don’t know many recipes
• Not everyone in the family wants the same meal
• Not enough time to cook
• Don’t know healthy cooking methods

All of these scenarios are reasonable and relatable. Since making healthy meals is something that can take some planning, we need to carve out time in our schedule to find recipes, go to the store, and make sure that we’re keeping a variety in our diet on a weekly basis. It takes effort to plan your meals. It takes initiative to live a healthier life. We find that tackling our challenges around eating and living healthier is easiest if we break them down into smaller bullet points, so that we can get specific about what actions we need to take (like the list above). So, we’ve compiled a list of what we find works best, and what has helped to keep us most consistent in incorporating healthy meals into our lives on a daily basis.

Ten tips to make healthy meals:

• Sit down and plan your meals. If you want your healthy eating to be consistent, you need to make your planning a priority each week. Setting aside time to choose your meals at the beginning of week will be a time saving technique in the long run.
• Write out your grocery list. If you feel overwhelmed by going to the grocery store (like we do), we find that it’s easiest to know exactly what you need before you go on your shopping trip. It keeps you focused and you won’t buy things that you don’t need.
• Look at cooking books that inspire you for easy recipes. Not everyone is a cook, and that’s ok. Much of what our favorite chefs have in their cookbooks feels out of our reach, but they will often have recipes that they know the “average” cook will not find overwhelming.We recommend starting with those.
• Keep it simple and spice it up. We love vegetables, like a lot. It’s very simple to make a meal out of veggies that are steamed or baked with a bit of spices thrown on top.
• Incorporate herbs into your cooking. Herbs can add so much flavor to your meal that you can hold back on the sodium, which is always a plus. Consider grabbing some basil, thyme, or rosemary for your next dish.
• Make salad your main dish. Salads can be extravagant, and more filling than we give them credit for. Add some farro or rice to your salad to make them more hearty. Fruit and nuts are also one of our favorite things to top our greens with.
• Bake don’t fry. If we’re thinking of making healthy meals, fried food is not something that comes to mind. This feels like a no-brainer but it’s a gentle reminder: don’t ingest more oil than necessary. Though we love a good fried chicken dish, using the oven or grill can really cut back on excessive grease and fat.
• Try foods that are outside of your comfort zone. We know this one can be challenging, but we find that when we’re making healthy meals, we can sometimes fall into a pattern of making the same dishes over and over, which leads to boredom, which leads to falling off track. Push yourself to try new foods and keep your eating interesting.
• Grow your own vegetables or herbs. We don’t all have an outdoor space in the city, but we’ve had success with growing small peppers and herbs on the window sill! Cooking with something that you’ve personally grown is very fulfilling and we highly recommend doing it if you haven’t.
• Cook what makes you feel best. When we listen to what our bodies want we know we’re going to make better decisions. Cooking healthy meals might mean something different to everyone, so stay in tune with what’s right for you.  
• Last but not least, Cook meals ready to eat to save time!

Almost there…

We also found a great list on Eating Well for ten cooking tips to make your favorite foods healthier that we think a lot of people will love. Check it out and see how you can make healthy meals of your favorite foods by smartly substituting ingredients and being diligent about your cooking methods.

As we mentioned at the beginning of this post, CookUnity chefs believe that healthy meals start with the best ingredients. We love knowing where our meats and produce are coming from, and having relationships with the farmers we source from is important to us. Check out some of our favorite meals, and let us keep you on track with your healthy eating. Hope your lean some key points from these 10 tips to make healthy meals to start cooking!