One of the key factors to a peaceful, purposeful and happy life is diet. For me personally, I feel much more balance, control, and powerful when I’m eating right. For me it’s not only the health, but it’s also about setting goals (I want to eat right) and achieving them. It goes hand in hand with exercise and overall mental health. In fact, eating healthy has been shown to provide: longer life, happiness, vitality, great skin, weight loss, life satisfaction, and better relationships. It helps our attitude, our outlook, and our energy.

Since a healthy diet is such an important factor in our lives, it just makes sense to find ways of making it easier. If there are short cuts I want to know about them – they are usually worth their weight in gold. So, for the last month or so I’ve been tracking various ideas for eating healthy. Some are easy little hacks, and some are more general, but the idea is to make eating healthier easier. With marketers, commercials and media all telling us what to eat (and seldom do they have our health in mind) we need all the help we can get.

So here they are in no particular order:

1. Wait 10-15 minutes: After eating a small to medium-ly portioned meal, wait. Wait 15 minutes before deciding if your still hungry or not. Often our brain doesn’t feel full until 15 minutes after eating has passed. With this short stall, we can trick ourselves, and feel full with out actually eating more.

2. Eat smaller meals: Going hand in hand with waiting 15 minutes, is to eat smaller portions. In the US especially, we are used to Costco, Walmart, Chevy Trucks, and Super Sized. What’s funny is that 90% of the world doesn’t operate this way. It’s amazing how many calories (and dollars) can be saved by just reducing what we consume.

3. Count your calories: For at least for 60-90 days, or until it’s a habit, track how many calories you eat in a day. You may be surprised to find out you are normally eating 3,000 calories a day, when you should really only be eating 2,100. Plus when you count your calories you become much more aware of everything your eating.

4. Track/log what you eat: Along with tracking your calories (at least for 60-90 days until it’s a habit), track what you eat. You’ll want to know how many carbohydrates, proteins and fats your eating each day. Too much of one, and not enough of the other leads to unbalance, and isn’t healthy.

5. Replace carbohydrates with protein. So much of what we get at the store, and at restaurants is filled to the brim with carbohydrates. We need to actively look at ingredients and get more protein and less carbohydrates.

6. No eating before bedtime: Something I’ve noticed really helps my weight, and overall metabolism is not eating before I go to sleep. 1) I wake up hungry, this kicks my metabolism off to a good start and 2) eating right before bed turns the energy your body gets from the food directly into fat instead of burning it off.

7. No carbs 5-6 hours before bedtime. Your body doesn’t really need carbohydrates in the late afternoon and before bed time. Since you’ll be sleeping you don’t need the energy that comes from eating carbohydrates. Your body turns carbohydrates into fat instead of energy when all you do is sleep on them.

8. Drink water. 1) it’s good for you. 2) it curbs your appetite – many times instead of being hungry, I was actually thirsty. Drinking some water satisfied that appetite, and I no longer craved food.

9. Eat natural. When in doubt eat something natural. Not frozen, packaged, processed, or produced. Look for as little ingredients as possible.

10. Don’t use self-control: That’s right, I said “don’t”. The idea here is that if you don’t want to eat it, don’t buy it, or have it in the house at all. If it’s not even there, it’s not a temptation and you don’t have to use self control. Try to use will power as little as possible.

11. Brush your teeth early. I noticed that when I brush my teeth, I’m much less likely to eat something afterwards. I have this idea that I have already brushed my teeth, and I don’t want to brush them again. So, whenever I can, I’ll brush my teeth as early as possible, this takes care of any before bed temptations.

There it is. Have any more?

Note: I am by no means a professional nutritionist or anything like that. These are merely things that have helped me. Please consult a professional when making any changes to your diet.

Every so often I like to think about things that give me great ROI (Return On Investment) – not in terms of money, but in terms of peace and purpose. What little thing could I do that gives me a lot of peace and serenity? Well, one of the things that I’ve found is eating healthy.

There is something really special, and peaceful that comes over me, just by eating healthy foods, and in good proportions. It’s almost amazing how much this effects my mood, and to a larger extent my life. I feel more at peace with myself, my family, my friends – more productive, alert, happier, the list of positive effects goes on and on. And this doesn’t even touch the physical and tangible effects: longer life, better blood flow, less fat, stronger organs, etc.

It’s truly one of those things that gives great return on investment. Put in a little work to prepare good food, planning your meals, and times that you eat, and you’ll get a great return – immense amounts of peace.