Back to Routine: How to Get Your Healthy Eating Habits Back on Track After Summer

By Lizzie Streit, MS, RDN, LD

For many people, summer days are often less structured. Vacations, weekend trips, cookouts, changes to school and work schedules, and later sunsets tend to throw off even the most ingrained routines. This leads to less predictable eating patterns and more indulgences than you may realize.

Fortunately, the start of fall presents an opportunity to rebuild some of your healthy eating routines! While you don’t need to compensate for or “burn off” the extra desserts or foods you enjoyed in the summer, you can take advantage of the return to your regular schedule to plan more balanced meals and get back to your 1200 calorie diet.

Here are seven realistic ways to restart your healthy eating routine this fall.

1 - Don’t try to change everything right away.

Although you may be eager to rebuild your habits, trying to implement too many strategies at once will make it difficult to succeed. Avoid making Labor Day Monday or your kids’ first full week back at school a firm deadline to get back on track. You don’t need to instantly start meal prepping every Sunday, avoiding all desserts, or working out six days a week.

Instead, identify two to three habits that would make the biggest difference. Examples include eating a vegetable at lunch and dinner most days or planning two to three dinners on Sunday evenings to avoid a last-minute Monday takeout order. You could also focus on waking up 10 minutes earlier to eat breakfast, or better yet, preparing some overnight oats and hard-boiled eggs for you and your family to grab on rushed mornings. A “perfect” routine is never realistic, but you can still create habits that stick by starting small.

2 - Re-establish regular meal times.

Casual snacks and impromptu dinners are a fun aspect of summer living that become unrealistic when work and school schedules restart. While it may be disappointing to leave this kind of eating behind, the return of routine provides an opportunity to create structure around meals again.

Eating meals at consistent times helps maintain energy levels and can prevent you from getting overly hungry and eventually eating too much. Aiming for three meals and a snack is a good place to start, but when you actually eat depends on your schedule.

Consider your work meetings, school pickup if you have kids, exercise class times, and other commitments. Then, come up with a rough schedule for breakfast, lunch, snack, and dinner. If you foresee a long gap between lunch and dinner, thanks to soccer practice, band rehearsal, or extracurriculars, pack a snack with protein and fiber to keep you satisfied until your meal. Jerky, nuts, string cheese, roasted beans,or a container of Greek yogurt can be paired with fruit for an easy option. Sticking to a consistent eating routine is especially important if you take a GLP-1 medication, since you may not always feel hungry and end up not eating enough.

3 - Bring back the balanced plate.

The balanced plate, made up of ½ non-starchy vegetables, ¼ protein, and ¼ complex carbohydrates (plus healthy fat), is a simple yet highly effective way to ease back into healthy eating. When meal planning for the week, choose recipes that include a food that fits into each category.

If your fall schedule makes it challenging to cook, use the balanced plate as a guide for preparing components that you keep in the fridge and can quickly turn into meals. For breakfast, put together cottage cheese, fruit, and hemp hearts. Have shredded chicken, salad greens, olive oil dressing, and fruit available for lunch, and make ground beef, brown rice, and fajita veggies in advance for a taco bowl dinner.

4 - Make your weekly meal plan very simple.

The best kind of meal planning is the one you can actually implement. While the idea of meal planning can feel overwhelming, you can simplify the entire process by thinking about your schedule strategically. Instead of choosing five full recipes to make Monday through Friday, look at your calendar first.

Identify which nights you have time to cook. If it’s only two or three, pencil in an easy recipe for those evenings. Consider sheet pan meals, soups, or skillet dinners instead of elaborate dinners. For the other nights, plan one leftover night, one meal with convenience options (great for when kids have activities), and one flexible night (takeout, leftovers, easy recipe). Convenience foods that you can easily incorporate into balanced meals include prepared meats (such as rotisserie chicken or Kevin’s brand), frozen vegetable medleys, and boxed whole grain sides.

5 - Come up with a few default meals.

Planning healthy meals can eventually lead to decision fatigue. That’s why it’s helpful to have a list of default meals that are easy to make and everyone in your household enjoys, especially during busy weeks. Typing up a list to keep on your phone is a helpful way to remember these options and prevent yet another takeout order when you’re working on healthy eating.

Meals that require almost no thought include:

●      1 pound ground beef + 1 jar marinara sauce + 1 pound whole grain pasta + 1 container baby spinach (stirred into the browned beef and sauce to wilt)

●      Grilled cheese + canned tomato or lentil soup (lentil for more protein) + carrot sticks

●      Microwaveable brown rice + canned black beans + jarred salsa + canned fire-roasted corn + cottage cheese

6 - Stock your kitchen for your busiest days instead of your best days.

In an ideal world with no busy schedules, it would be easy to cook from scratch for every meal. Even the best-laid plans can get thrown off by a meeting that runs late or a basketball game that goes into overtime. Instead of filling your fridge and pantry with ingredients you hope to use, focus on foods for nights when you have 10 minutes and very little motivation.

Some useful staples that can be incorporated into a variety of balanced meals include frozen vegetables, microwaveable grains, canned beans, canned tuna, eggs, bagged salads, hummus, and whole-grain breads. These kinds of “processed foods” are nutritious and convenient and do not contain high amounts of sugar, salt, or unnecessary additives that ultra-processed foods contain.

7 - Have a backup plan for nights when your routine falls apart.

While having defaults meals and a pantry stocked with nutritious foods makes healthy eating easier, there will still be nights when even those tools fall short. If your schedule makes it increasingly difficult to put together balanced meals, having prepared meals on hand may be an excellent solution for you.

Healthy For Life Meals offers nutritionally balanced, freshly prepared menus to make healthy eating a breeze. Choose from different options, depending on your calorie needs and preferences, and enjoy the convenience of done-for-you breakfast, lunch, and dinner. No planning, grocery shopping, or cooking required. Make healthy eating the easy part of your routine.  Get started today.