Healthy eating isn’t a new idea to most people. The average person tries to eat healthy and live a healthy lifestyle… for the most part. However, many high schoolers tend to not eat nutritionally balanced diets and will eat junk food, which can affect their performance in and out of school activities. Eating healthy is really important especially when you’re a growing teenager. A lot of people think to eat healthy you only eat fruit and vegetables and you starve yourself. When actually, eating healthy can be a lot of fun, and once you change your diet for a little bit you start to crave healthy food.

Why eat healthy?

If you’re doing a sport it is extremely important to recieve all your nutrients in order to prevent injuries. Many high schoolers will start to feel something hurt, and just ignore it until the season ends, but their injury could have possibly been prevented by eating healthy, whole foods which helps you recover from your daily exercise. Another reason to eat healthier is plainly just to feel good. Even though eating ice cream, cupcakes, and pizza tastes amazing, it doesn’t leave you feeling amazing, but you can still satisfy your cravings with whole foods and not feel horrible afterwards.  

3 tips to guide you towards healthy eating

1. Meal Prep- Meal prep can be extremely helpful because eating healthy food often requires more prep-time. Meal prep can help you make better choices because you already have the food and you only need to warm it up then enjoy.
2. Leave the junk at the store- We all know that it can be very tempting to buy all the sweets in the store, and don’t let the packaging fool you because half the time the “healthy” sweets are only worse for you. When shopping in the store try to stay out of the isles as much as possible because the food in the isles tend to have a lot of preservatives and have little to no nutritional value.
3. Know the ingredients- Most people will grab protein bars and think they are healthy for you because they have 20g of protein. However, that’s not necessarily the truth. You have to ask yourself, where is this protein coming from? You also need to look at the ingredient list before you look at the nutrition label. If you can’t pronounce one of the ingredients it means it’s most likely not good for you.