Open your fridge and count how many things you bought because you always buy them.
Not because you particularly fancied them this week. Not because you have an exciting recipe planned. They just came home with you again.
Food habits can become incredibly automatic. That is useful when Tuesday is busy, and everybody needs dinner, but less useful when your diet has been running on the same short playlist for years.
Adding variety does not need a complete menu overhaul.
Start interrupting the autopilot occasionally. Buy the vegetable next to your usual one. Cook a different grain.
Here are five healthy ways to add more variety to your diet:
Stop Thinking Things Belong To Restaurants
There are probably foods you happily order but rarely cook yourself.
Fish is a common one.
So are lentils, beans, interesting salads, and vegetables that require slightly more imagination than boiling them.
Pick one and learn one easy way to make it at home.
You already know you like eating it.
Half the difficult work has therefore been rather conveniently done for you.
See also: Coping with the Pressures of Urban Life
Check Your Cupboards
Most households have at least one thing in the cupboard or freezer that hasn’t been used.
The half-bag of lentils. Frozen seafood. The tin of chickpeas bought with nothing but good intentions. The barley that has survived three cupboard clean-outs.
Before buying something new, use one of those forgotten ingredients properly. Find a meal you would genuinely want to eat and put it to work.
Your cupboards may already contain more variety than your actual diet currently suggests.
Stop Looking For Entirely New Meals
Your regular dinners are an excellent place to add variety.
You already know which flavors work and roughly how long everything takes, so change one thing.
Make cottage pie with venison rather than your usual meat, put a different fish into your favorite recipe, or swap the beans in a chili.
You get something different for dinner without sacrificing the useful part where you already know what you are doing.
Look For Seasonal Changes
There is no particularly good reason for your fruit and vegetable drawer to look identical in January and July.
Look for what is in season and looking good at the time when you go shopping. That naturally gives different produce a turn throughout the year.
You do not need a seasonal eating spreadsheet. Just occasionally buy what looks best rather than automatically reaching for the same things you bought during your last twenty supermarket visits.
Stop Making Healthy Foods So Serious
Not every nutritious ingredient needs to arrive in a worthy-looking bowl.
Put fruit into pancakes, vegetables onto pizza, make tacos with beans and avocado, and throw nuts into your breakfast.
If healthy foods only appear when you are making a determined effort to “eat well”, your options become unnecessarily limited.
Let them turn up in normal food too. They are perfectly capable of fitting in.
Final Words
To sum it up: stop letting habit make every food decision for you.
Try the thing you normally order out. Use the neglected tin in the pantry. Change just one ingredient.
Small changes to your usual routine add up, and dinner becomes considerably less predictable in the process.
