Can You Relate? Sticking to Healthy Meals in the New Year
The following article was written by Heinen’s Chief Dietitian, Melanie Jatsek RD, LD.
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What would you say is the top cause for people ditching their healthy eating goals?
If your guess was that it simply felt too hard to maintain, you nailed it. For some reason, we think making better food choices involves revamping all our meals and making a complete 180 from our old eating habits. We believe that the answer to our health challenges lies in a perfectly mapped-out meal plan.
I won’t argue that a meal plan is a useful tool for helping us get on track, but when it involves cooking and prepping three meals a day, our motivation swiftly turns into overwhelm, and we quit before we ever get started. Can you relate?
In my experience, people tend to struggle with dinner more than breakfast or lunch, so I’ll make that the focus of this post. But rest assured, you can copy this formula for any meal.
The Magic of One Meal
What if, instead of seven dinners each week, you only had to cook one?
You may be wondering how you can possibly turn your health around with just one healthy dinner a week. It seems too good to be true, doesn’t it?
Think about the last time you embarked on a journey to improve your health. Maybe you started drinking more water instead of soda or went for a short walk after dinner each night. Whatever it was, remember how you felt after accomplishing that one little thing? If you’re like most of us, you felt proud of yourself and wanted to do more! It’s human nature, and it works in your favor. The key is not overcommitting.
Now let’s get back to that one dinner. Commit to making one meal that you know you and your family will enjoy this week. Soup is a great place to start because it’s relatively easy, but you can choose anything you’d like:
After you pick your meal style, hop over to Heinen’s website, select a Club Fx-Approved Recipe, and start cooking! You will be pleasantly surprised to find that most of these recipes take less than 30 minutes to prepare.
Key Takeaway
The magic sauce for sticking to your 2026 healthy eating goals: start with one healthy meal and let the spirit of motivation carry you the rest of the way. That’s all there is to it!
