How to maintain a balanced diet

You really don’t need to rely on willpower. After half a year of going through the pits, I realized that the core of persistence is never to strictly copy every requirement of the dietary guideline. It is to first stretch the balanced standard to the extent that it suits your current life, and then embed healthy options bit by bit. There is no need to overthrow the original eating habits and rebuild.

At the beginning, I also believed in the "standard answers" on the Internet, which said that the intake should be strictly calculated in grams. Each staple food should weigh 100g, the protein should be as big as one hand, and the vegetables should be two handfuls. I bought a food scale that is accurate to the gram and weighed each item when bringing rice. When ordering takeout at work, I had to browse the merchant's ingredient details page to calculate calories. I got tired of it after less than a week. I was working overtime on a project and I just broke out and ate hamburgers and fried chicken for three days in a row. All my previous efforts were in vain, and I gained two pounds.

Later, I came to my senses after talking to a friend who works in clinical nutrition. Many people’s misunderstanding about “balanced diet” is that they regard it as a rigid test that requires 100 points. However, for ordinary people without special health needs, being able to achieve 60 points is already higher than most people. There is no need to achieve perfect scores from the beginning. For example, if you are used to eating the meat buns with soy milk from downstairs in the morning, you don’t have to switch to the bland oatmeal porridge with boiled eggs. You only need to put an extra small tomato or half a crisp cucumber in the bun, and the vitamin gap in the morning will be made up. ； I always like to order stir-fried rice bowl with heavy oil and salt at noon. I spend an extra 3 yuan to add boiled green vegetables. The excess oil and salt can be partially neutralized by dietary fiber. These changes hardly require you to spend extra time and energy, and you will not feel like "I am enduring hardship and restraint", so it is naturally easier to stick to it.

Of course, I have also met staunch "quantitative" friends who say that if you don't count by grams, there is no balance at all. Especially for people who have clear needs such as controlling sugar and building muscle, eating in a haphazard way will not achieve their goals. I completely agree with this. If you have clear health adjustment goals in the short term, it is necessary to use a food scale to establish portion awareness in the first 1-2 weeks. But in the long term, you can’t go out to restaurants, and you have to wear a scale when you have dinner with friends, right? In fact, just like when you first learn to ride a bicycle, you need to install training wheels. Once you have muscle memory for the weight of "one punch of staple food, one palm of protein, two punches of vegetables", you can completely throw away the training wheels and choose based on feel, and you will not make a big mistake.

Last week, I had a barbecue with my colleagues in the department, and I didn’t hold it back. The roasted lamb loin, cold beer, and cheese-roasted sweet potatoes were all the same. I was very happy when I ate them. I went home the next day and cooked some vegetable noodles with fried eggs as usual, and I didn’t gain any weight at all. On the contrary, every time I strictly controlled my diet before, whenever I had a dinner party, I would easily have the mentality of "I might as well eat more if I break the habit today". If I could eat the usual three meals in one meal, I would be more likely to rebound.

In fact, to put it bluntly, a balanced diet is something that will accompany you for a lifetime. It is not a task that you can stick to for three months. Don’t regard it as a restriction that binds you. The more relaxed you are and find the right way to eat that suits your life rhythm, the longer you can go on.