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Read this if you feel that eating healthier is difficult

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​Hi Reader, eating well is a crucial part of a natural lifestyle and living in balance. Sometimes it feels hard, but as we have talked about creating natural lifestyle habits, these changes cannot be rushed but step-by-step introduced to your life to make them stick.

When I struggled to make better eating habits and just a hint more healthy food I started with these small rules:

1. Replace with homemade
2. Substitute with better ingredients
3. Learn to live without

Let me break it down for you in a second.

But first, pause for a minute and think about things that you often buy from the store that you feel may not be healthy. Sauces? Sweets? Snacks?
Do you have them in your mind?

Perfect. Write them down. We’ll get to them later in this email!

For our family it was things like nut butter, salted nuts, iced tea, cream cheese - you know regular stuff. Mundane. But if you check the labels you don’t feel that comfortable with the number of additional ingredients, stabilizers, AND salt they contain.
​
Now if you pick one thing on your list, like for me, roasted nuts. I can say that they are super simple to make at home, they cost less when bought raw and untreated and you can easily decrease the amount or completely exclude salt if you feel like it!

Same thing we did with almond butter and cashew butter which are simple to do at the same time as roasting the nuts and almonds in the oven for snack. Nowadays we enjoy natural almond butter without salt or sweetener at all!

If skipping the “bad” or “unhealthy” ingredient feels too much in one go, try to substitute it with something a bit healthier option.

I did this recently with iced tea. I loved to drink iced tea, but the ingredient list horrified me especially the amount of artificial sweeteners and colorants. So I started testing with homemade versions and replaced plain white sugar with honey to make lemon iced tea.

You can try this out as well by replacing even only half of the ingredients like I have done with cream cheese spread (replacing half of the cream cheese with protein-rich and less fatty quark) or any bread recipe, to add a bit of full-grain flour to replace plain flour. I have done it with some semolina recipes, so I have tweaked the semolina bread recipe and the semolina porridge recipe both with half of full-grain semolina to make it a hint better every time.

Because like going to the gym to keep yourself fit, it is less helpful if one day you are eating super healthy and rest days whatever. Math and I are not exactly the best friends, but the concept of compounding is amazing not just when talking about investments but for life choices. Making every day small good decisions will lead you far my friend.

Now the list you made of the frequently consumed less healthy things in your family. Think about one of the items and how you could tweak it a bit healthier to try it out this weekend.

If you run into any trouble, send your list to me and we can brainstorm together how you could start making changes.

Every day makes a difference. ♡

Sonja

Blue Tea Tile

​blueteatile.com​

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