How difficult is eating healthy for an individual?  As a runner, it’s extremely important to give yourself the proper fuel for getting through your workouts.

I’ve heard it said that being motivated enough to eat well can be more difficult than being motivated to exercise for some people, especially if you consider yourself a busy person.  It can be made more difficult because eating the right foods are often not as convenient as eating the foods that are readily available.

I do not believe that eating healthy is all that difficult, nor does it have to be very inconvenient or expensive. With a little planning ahead, you can easily provide yourself with plenty of healthy snacks, meals and leftovers with which to fuel yourself.

I actually think that eating healthy can be easier when you are busy because a small amount of time up front can prevent you from wasting a lot of time throughout the week.

You will not have to worry about going out to a restaurant or fast food establishment for your lunches, you will not have to go to the grocery store every day or two to get the staples that you need to prepare dinner, and you won’t have to waste time by going out to eat when you don’t have anything to cook.

In my household, every week for dinner we usually eat some sort of fish or other seafood once or twice, eat a vegetarian meal at least once or twice, and try to mix up our chicken, pork and beef throughout the week. Many of our meals include some sort of pasta, rice or quinoa.

Throughout the week, we keep a list of the meals that we are going to prepare that week, and what we want to eat the next week. Individual meals may change for which day we are actually going to cook them on, but by having our list we can make sure that we have everything we need to make those meals on our one shopping trip each week.

When I am preparing dinner, I usually cook for 6 to 10 people unless we are eating fish. This provides ample leftovers for lunches throughout the week. My wife eats a normal portion, I usually eat 1.5 to 2 normal portions, and the rest feeds us for lunch. Often we’ll also freeze some of our leftovers for later meals so that we’ll have something quick to pull out and thaw to eat.

By planning ahead, we can make sure that we have plenty of healthy food options available, most of which taste better than the overly-processed junk that you may be eating now anyway.