Last month, we taught you all about proper nutrition to take care of your heart. This was in celebration of American Heart Month. For March, we’re celebrating another similar topic. This month is National Nutrition Month, a thirty one day observance dedicated to healthy eating choices for your overall health, and not simply your heart health. However, it’s easy to absorb all the information about making the right choices, but it can be very difficult to actually execute them. Therefore, the information below provides tips and hints on how to bar those bad eating habits!

Eat a Healthy Breakfast

Have you ever had a late afternoon craving or even feel the need to consume a large lunch? It’s probably because you didn’t eat a proper breakfast. Your parents and doctors weren’t kidding when they said it’s the most important meal. By fueling up early in the morning, you’re preparing yourself for the rest of the day. This helps if you’re trying to remain active as well. Not only will it actively stop you from wanting to snack on empty carbs throughout the day, but you’ll also feel more energetic, so you’ll be less inclined to skip a walk or a workout.

If you’re curious about what is included in a healthy breakfast try these!

• Berries with low-fat cottage cheese and high fiber cereal
• Whole-wheat English muffin or toast with peanut butter
• Whole grain cereal with low-fat or fat-free milk
• Oatmeal with a side of hard-boiled or scrambled egg

Make Dinner at Home

It can be a tiring process to make yourself something to eat at the end of a long day. You may be inclined to order out or head to your favorite restaurant and sit comfortably as you wait for your meal to be prepared. Unfortunately, takeout food isn’t the healthiest option for us, and restaurants tend to serve you larger portions. As a result, your intake of empty carbs increases, and you may overeat. There’s nothing wrong with doing it a couple of times a week, but it certainly should NOT be a daily occurrence. It’s a bad eating habit.

Cooking meals at home can add a lot of nutritious value to your diet. When you cook, you tend to serve yourself a portion that is less than what a restaurant would serve, and you can include healthier sides. French fries are delicious, but you shouldn’t eat them with every meal. Try including fresh fruits and fresh vegetables with your meal. The sugars from fruit provide a nice burst of energy that won’t make you crash, while the green leafy vegetables provide you some much needed calcium to help your bones remain strong.

Reduce Your Caffeine Intake

A cup of coffee isn’t a bad choice to help you reduce your urge to snack. It suppresses your appetite, so you don’t feel like eating everything in your cupboard before noon. However, drinking too much coffee and receiving too much caffeine will certainly NOT help you in the long run. It makes you jittery, which is a result of the caffeine crash. This crash will cause you to be lethargic and sleepy for the rest of the day.

As a result of this crash, most people will then eat another sugary snack or drink another sugary drink to wake themselves up. This is a bad cycle to find yourself in, and it needs to be broken. Again, a cup of coffee is not bad for you. However, having over 3 cups a day is. People don’t recognize that the reasons they’re so tired in the afternoon is NOT because they haven’t had enough coffee, but because they’ve had too much. Find an alternative to a third or fourth cup of coffee. As we stated above, fresh fruit give you a nice jolt of energy from their natural sugars and won’t cause you to crash a few hours later in the day.