Eating Well can be very hard!

Despite our best intentions to eat properly, our society just doesn't make it easy. Daily, we are bombarded by messages and pictures of "fast food" options - more burger, more bacon, more fat! And yet they look wonderful on those billboards and tv commercials. We know that this food is not good for us, but now in our subconscious is the image and the message that more is better.

Its no wonder many of us have "supersized" ourselves.

We live in a fast-paced society, with a seemingly never-ending list of things to do. In order to eat at all, we often find ourselves either at the drive-thru, or making less than healthy choices in the supermarket in order to save time. Even in restaurants, menu choices are far from healthy. Several days ago I was at a "roadhouse" type establishment and noticed that the smallest steak serving was 8 oz (and I thought aprotein portion was 3 oz), all of the salads had either fatty dressings or meat on them and the baked potatoes all come with loads of butter and sour cream. Not a whole grain, low-fat option on the menu.

So now, we can journey into the grocery store. Surely, healthy food choices are plentiful here... but a box of kraft dinner is $1.49 and a bag of whole grain rice is $7.99. Organic food is more expensive. Lean meat ditto. Regular yogurt is on sale and the probiotic yogurt is not.

So is healthy eating only for those with the time and money?

What if we were to change our whole society's way of thinking about food. Now I don't think we can convince the fast food giants to offer a side of vegi-sticks instead of fries, but maybe we can take some smaller steps instead.

Probably the most common-sense thing I've read about nutrition says to only eat nutritionally rich foods. Well okay! That sounds easy. And it sounds reasonable, as you certainly wouldn't expect your car to run well on cheap crappy gasoline. Yet we fill our diet with cheap crappy food and then wonder why we feel tired and... well, crappy!

So if we fill our diet with nutritionally rich foods and eliminate the toxic simple sugars and saturated fats, we should be running like a race car on high-octane fuels. However, as easy as this sounds, in practice it is in fact, much harder, due to all of the reasons that I've gone into above. So maybe, we keep this as our goal, and realize that once in a while, we're probably going to sneak in the occasional pile of spaghetti and meatballs.

I think that as long as we try to eat healthy foods on a regular basis, the occasional slip won't be too bad. Listen to your body and recognize when its telling you its had enough. Then stop. Order a restaurant meal and realize that it can also be lunch the next day.

Make better choices. Have better health. Can it really be that easy? Yes, I think it can.

For more information on nutrition, visit the Nutrition and Breast Cancer section of our website.