Food Substitutions: How to Replace Unhealthy Snacks

 

 

As we get older it’s important to keep making gradual improvements to our daily diet.

You might be able to get away with consuming countless canned sugary energy drinks and fried corn chips when your 23, but as the years pass it’s best to give your body the nutritious foods it needs to repair or replace damaged cells.

We all need a little inspiration to keep making those small lifestyle and nutritional adjustments that lead to robust good health!

4 Food Substitutions that Can Help You Get Healthy

What has been extremely helpful for me in losing belly fat, has been to replace less-healthy snacks with healthier ones. However, it took me a while to find the right snacks that satisfied me as much as the old, fattening snacks did. Here are some examples of what I mean — you may find these snacking substitutions can help you get healthier, too!

Substitution #1: Replace One Cup of Coffee a Day with Yerba Mate Tea

I used to have coffee every morning, and once in a while I still enjoy a freshly made coffee blended shake, But ultimately I decided that getting that huge jolt of caffeine in the morning, for 365 mornings in a row, might not be the healthiest thing for my body.

Some health experts are now saying that we have to be mindful of not overstimulating, and then exhausting, our adrenal glands. Also, I decided that coffee is extremely acidic, and I didn’t want to hit my insides with that first thing in the day.

So now I ease into my day more gently with yerba mate tea, made from tea leaves that grow in Amazonian rain forests. I make it the easy way, by steeping tea bags in hot water for five minutes. However, yerba mate is a treasured South American tradition that is used to celebrate good will and camaraderie among neighbors and friends.

Here’s a video of the world’s most popular extraction method for yerba mate — millions of South Americans do this every day! Yerba mate has a clean buzz, a very enjoyable flavor, is nutritious, and, yes, mood-elevating! Have a look:

 

Substitution #2: Replace a Take-Out Burrito with a Southwest Scramble

Some nights we come home from work so tired that the thought of making a healthy dinner from scratch seems…well, daunting. The temptation is to microwave a frozen burrito or have pizza delivered. But wait! Here’s a healthy, delicious, home-cooked meal you can make in under ten minutes! The miracle of modern food-processors now allow having a dinner full of delicious raw food vegetables to be a quick and easy undertaking. Just make a rawcamole topping for some free range scrambled eggs:

 

Substitution #3: Replace Ice Cream with a Freshly Made Frozen Dessert

I have a super high-powered blender that makes healthy desserts in a snap. Tonight I made a creamy “ice cream” in minutes with whole hazelnuts and frozen bananas. Other nights, I toss blueberries, rasberries, pecans, cinnamon, and ice. Other night I make a green mango ice cream with fresh spinach, macadamia nut butter, and frozen mango (sound strange to you? believe me when I tell you that it is astoundingly refreshing and scrumptious!).

Often I do peaches, frozen bananas, ice, cinnamon, and a bit of coconut (If I worked out hard that day, I might add a bit of plant protein powder or even whey protein just to feed my muscles). This one trick that I’m sharing with you now — learning to make frozen desserts in my Vitamix blender to replace more traditional desserts like cookies, cake, or store-bought dairy ice cream — is what’s responsible for my trimmer waist now. Plus, when I wake up in the morning, I no longer have that puffy face (that comes from eating flour or dairy at night).

Substitution #4: Replace Break-Room Bagels with Navitas Power Snacks

Even for the most careful and disciplined of us, sometimes we get to feeling a bit run down. Sometimes our stress levels get higher than they should, other times there is a flu or cold going around the office or school. During those challenging periods, sometimes our bodies require a little extra nourishment and protection.

But, oddly, sometimes it’s when we’re most tired that we eat our worst! When we’re super busy, fresh food preparation seems too time-consuming. It’s time like these when office break-rooms are danger zones! In most office break rooms you can often find coffee, candy, bagels, chips, twizzlers, birthday cake, and snacks on trays that have been sitting there since morning and that everyone’s been breathing on all day!

What to do instead? I’m a big fan of the new line of superfood snacks from Navitas. They have several enticing flavors — I especially love the Citrus Chia! — that are loaded with nutrient-rich superfoods. This is food that makes you strong and energizes you (unlike a bag of chips, which, let’s face it, are quite detrimental to your health over time; why have chips, when you could have superfoods?)!

The simple truth is that, for most people, reducing refined sugars and flours in the daily diet — and eating more vegetables — is a very, very good idea. Choosing healthier snacks to replace your more traditional vices is a smart place to start.

 
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