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The switch to a heart-healthy diet can seem daunting, but it’s easier than you think with the right approach. To start and stick to a heart-healthy diet, you can:

  • Audit your current diet
  • Make gradual changes at first
  • Track your progress
  • Be patient and persistent!

For better or worse, diet significantly impacts heart health (along with other organs, substances, components, and systems in the body). Through what you eat, you can maintain the health of your heart and lower your risk of heart disease. Or, your diet could be harming your heart health and putting you in danger of developing damaging cardiovascular problems.

If you:

  1. Have recently been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease and want to improve or manage your condition through diet
  2. Are at risk of developing a heart problem and want to improve your diet to prevent that from happening, or
  3. Are simply interested in learning more about how to eat better for the sake of your heart and body

Then consider the following tips for transforming the way you eat and think about food.

(And remember, a heart-healthy diet shouldn’t be something you think of as restrictive, bland, or undoable. It’s easier and tastier than you may think to transform your diet and patterns of eating.)

Heart-Healthy Diet Tip #1: Perform an Audit of Your Current Diet

Many times, we have no idea just how many calories we are consuming in a single day or throughout the week. Without awareness, it’s way too easy to consume more calories, fats, sodium, and sugars than the body needs on a regular basis.

A diet audit that shows you what you currently eat on an average basis is a perfect way to understand your current calorie intake and see, on paper (or a phone app), where you can start making improvements.

Why is a diet audit beneficial?

  • It shows you the macronutrients you are currently consuming
  • It shows you where you can begin making improvements
  • It sets up the habit of tracking

Tips for Auditing Your Current Diet

Track everything you eat in a standard week. Use an app like MyFitnessPal, MyNetDiary. Lose It!, or another you prefer. Or, you can keep a food journal and write everything down on paper.

Don’t start your audit during the holidays or other celebrations. You want to get a fair idea of what you eat on a regular basis. Holiday meals or celebratory events can significantly impact your audit and not provide an accurate look at your diet.

Keep it judgment-free! Don’t beat yourself up or give yourself a hard time about your diet if the results aren’t what you want them to be. Now is the time for an objective look at what’s going on so you can make shifts and changes next.

Heart-Healthy Diet Tip #2: Make Gradual Changes to What You Eat

Do you know why New Year’s resolutions fail so often and easily? It’s because people don’t spend time building up to the habit they set—they dive into the resolution too hard and too fast, causing them to fail just as quickly.

Some of the most common resolutions include:

  • Eating better
  • Working out more
  • Saving money
  • Quitting a vice like smoking or alcohol
  • Traveling more

But too commonly, people are only focused on the goal of the resolution (weight loss, more money in the bank, improved lungs and livers, or going somewhere), not working to establish the habits needed to reach those goals.

Changing your diet quickly and drastically is a recipe for disaster and discouragement. However, if you ease into the change with small, mindful choices, you will gradually develop the habits and mindset needed to eventually transform how you eat and maintain the transformation for the rest of your life.

Tips for Gradually Changing What You Eat

Swap full-sodium products for lower-sodium or sodium-free options. Reducing your sodium intake is really important to developing a heart-healthy diet. You can eat way less salt by making sodium-free meals and reaching for lower-sodium products for your recipes or snacks.

Add fiber to every plate. Fiber is found in a ton of food sources like fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, seeds, and whole grains—pretty much anything that grows in the ground can be a source of fiber. Incorporate fiber into every meal to get into the habit of having some, no matter what you’re eating.

Start reducing your intake of saturated fats and added sugar. Fried foods, processed foods, red meats, baked goods, dairy products, and others are often high in saturated fat, added sugar, or sometimes both. If a lot of these types of foods find their way onto your plate often, you can make a few swaps here and there to start lowering the amount of saturated fat and added sugar you consume regularly. The goal is to consume less of both by swapping foods that are high in sat fat and sugar with healthier options.

Heart-Healthy Diet Tip #3: Track Your Progress

As you work to change your diet to a more heart-healthy one, it can be highly beneficial to track what you eat, evaluate results often, and pivot whenever necessary.

Tracking is helpful for a number of reasons because it:

  • Shows you exactly what you eat for every meal
  • Reveals how often you eat or snack
  • Shows how your eating habits have changed (or stayed the same) over time
  • Shows where more improvements can be made for an even healthier diet
  • Keeps you accountable to yourself

Tracking can and will feel like a chore, and it will feel easy to omit some of the small stuff, like a handful of nuts between meals or a few pieces of chocolate at the end of the day. However, tracking everything allows you to see the whole picture and understand exactly what you eat every day.

Tips for Tracking Your Progress

Use a tracking app, like MyFitnessPal. MyFitnessPal is user-friendly, has a database with over 14 million types of foods, offers the ability to add or import your own recipes, shows you your macronutrient counts in addition to calorie counts, and even factors in the number of steps you take (or at least the number of steps your phone registers) and adjusts the day’s calorie goals based on your step count. There are other features, too, that come with both the free and paid version.

Heart-Hearly Diet Tip #4: Be Patient and Persistent

It’s not easy to change your diet for the better, especially when you’re accustomed to the highly processed foods that make up most of the standard Western diet. The majority of the foods we are accustomed to eating are designed to be extremely tasty, with emphasis on the word “designed.”

The combination of excessive salts, sugars, and fats found in so many processed foods keeps us coming back for more because the combo is delicious and addictive. Even if we know it’s also really harmful to our hearts and overall bodies, it’s hard to make the switch to healthier, more natural options.

So, if you find yourself slipping up or having a hard time getting into the groove of a new, healthier diet, that’s okay! Keep at it, have patience with yourself, and maintain persistence. Pretty soon, you’ll start noticing how easy it is to make heart-healthy switches and adapt to an overall heart-healthy diet.

Tips for Being Patient and Persistent

Be kind to yourself. If you do really well with your diet for a few days, then “fall off the wagon,” don’t beat yourself up. Just brush yourself off, remember the lessons you’ve learned to this point, and keep going.

Train your algorithm to show you tasty health-based recipes on social media. If you’re someone who likes to scroll through videos on TikTok, watch reels on Facebook or Instagram, or watch videos on YouTube, you can passively encourage yourself to stick to a heart-healthy diet by teaching your algorithm to feed you content like videos of heart-healthy recipes. When you see a video of someone making a heart-healthy recipe, engage with it by liking the video, sharing it with a friend, or commenting on it. If you come across a cooking video where they are using a lot of fats, salt, or sugar, just skip it.

The more you train your algorithm to feed you heart-healthy content, the easier it will become easier to shape your brain to embrace a more heart-healthy diet.

Learn what you can about heart-healthy diets. The Mediterranean diet and vegan diet are both hailed as the best options for boosting the health of your heart and other organs. The more you know about these diets, how they work, and what foods they allow, the more likely you can be to reach for Mediterranean- or vegan-friendly options come meal time.

The Cardiologists at Middle Georgia Heart Have More Tips for Sticking to a Heart-Healthy Diet. Schedule a Consultation With Our Team Today: 478-207-5224

Your heart health is so important to your well-being, and our heart doctors and team want to help you protect it. In addition to services and treatments to treat or manage cardiovascular complications, we also offer the tips, advice, and guidance you need to keep your heart fit and healthy.

Schedule a consultation with us today: 478-207-5224

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