Healthy Habit: 5 Reasons to Avoid Eating the Same Thing Every Day

Replacing unhealthy eating habits with positive daily choices is the key to successfully losing weight and keeping it off. Your Nutrisystem plan is designed to help you to build a healthy eating routine. But even a good healthy habit that’s repeated without variation can turn into a rut that leads to boredom and temptation.

Once you discover a few healthy foods you really like, you might find yourself just eating them day after day. That’s not a bad idea when you’re beginning your weight loss journey, as you become accustomed to choosing better foods. But eating a wide variety of foods is an important healthy habit, too.

Ready to embark on a new healthy habit? Here are five reasons to include a variety of foods in your daily diet:

1. Total Nutrition

Each kind of food has its own mix of essential vitamins and minerals. Oranges and broccoli, for example, both contain vitamin A and vitamin C, but different amounts of each. What’s more, many foods provide you with unique kinds of nutrients. Broccoli, for instance, contains high levels of sulforaphane, a sulfur-containing compound that’s been linked to lower incidence of cancer and other diseases. When you eat a diverse diet, you supply your body with healthy amounts of all the major nutrients, and you get the complete array of supporting nutrients, too.

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2. Reduced Risks

The more variety of healthy foods you eat, the lower your chances are of suffering from high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome (the precursor to diabetes), according to a study reported in the Journal of Nutrition. The researchers also found that people who have diverse diets are less likely to have excess belly fat (which they termed “elevated waist circumference”) and less likely to be obese than those whose diets were more limited.

3. Greater Success

A favorite healthy habit of ours is eating a variety of foods. This increases your chances for long-term, sustainable weight loss, says a report in the Journal of Marketing Research. A team of scientists analyzed the eating patterns of overweight women for 16 weeks and concluded that “daily overall variety was positively associated with weight loss.” They add that “this positive effect emerged in particular with respect to increased breakfast and afternoon snack variety and even more so for vegetables.” That is, the more kinds of vegetables you eat, the better your chances of losing weight permanently.

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4. Stronger Interest

A healthy diet includes four to six meal occasions every day, and when you’re trying to lose weight, you look forward to each of them. But if you’re eating the same foods over and over again, you may lose your enthusiasm for them. To get yourself excited about eating again, you can be tempted by foods that are high in calories, fats, salt and sugar—the kinds of items that thwart your efforts to lose weight. Eating a variety of good foods makes every meal occasion special and helps you resist the urge to binge on unhealthy options.

5. More Flavor

When you are overweight, you gradually lose some of your sense of taste, according to research, published in the journal PLOS Biology. The scientists theorize this is the result of the inflammation throughout your body that is a by-product of excess weight. On the other hand, they found that losing weight restores your sense of taste. That means you can appreciate the flavors in good food that you may not have known about or tasted before. As you lose, you’ll want to expand your choices to discover new favorite healthy foods.

Great News!

The Nutrisystem menu offers you more than 150 food items to choose from. Whether you get excited about exotic flavors, such as Asian or Mexican cuisine, or if you prefer classic comfort foods, you can enjoy a wide variety of options that will have you anticipating every meal occasion.

Plus, your Nutrisystem plan includes Flex Meals, which let you put your new knowledge about healthy eating to work for yourself. With so many different choices in grocery stores nowadays, you can sample lots of foods to find the varieties you love. Every non-starchy vegetable in the produce department is a good pick, but also be sure to check the Nutrisystem Grocery Guide for fresh ideas for SmartCarbs, nutrient- and fiber-rich foods such as fruit, whole grains and starchy vegetables. You also can enjoy a diverse mix of PowerFuels, foods that are high in protein and healthy fats, such as nuts and seeds, cheese and seafood, as well as lean meats and poultry.