How Can I Make Healthy Eating Feel Natural Instead of a Constant Battle?

I’m gonna spare you the usual advice about finding lots of scrumptious healthy recipes. And about making your new healthy meals ahead of time in bulk in comically huge Tupperware containers. And about the trendy business of “Environmental Design”—which we used to just call “making shit convenient,” back in the day (stashing healthy foods in every nook and cranny of your life). Because AI and an army of TikTok influencers have already told you to do all that stuff a hundred times, and yet the whole healthy eating thing still feels like a constant battle.

Don’t get me wrong. These are all adorable tactics. Big fan. I use them with my clients all the time. It’s just that, all by themselves, they’re not nearly enough to make healthy eating feel natural and flowy. 

So let’s talk about what does. 

The epic dumbassery of willpower

One of the main things that makes healthy eating feel like a constant battle is the attempt to use willpower to do it. Oof. Worst. Idea. Ever.

Willpower is the wrong tool for the wrong job. Wrong on an epic scale. A Michael Bay movie scale. Willpower might work for a temporary “diet” (yuck… don’t do those) but holy smokes, not to permanently transform how you eat. 

Here’s how this works. Yes, willpower alone virtually always fails. We’ve known that for decades. But, believe it or not, that’s not even the worst thing. Read on.

This just in: punching yourself in the face feels bad

The problem is not just that white-knuckled, willpowery huffing and puffing fails. It’s that, when it fails, people beat the living crap out of themselves. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real reason healthy eating feels like a constant battle: it’s how brutally you pummel yourself when you cheat, slip, and digress. That is soul crushing. Oppressive beyond all recognition. That alone, all by itself, can make healthy eating feel like a nightmare.

It gets worse

Because when we beat ourselves up for falling off the healthy eating wagon, we usually think that the solution must be to set the healthy eating bar lower. Stop trying to eat quite so squeaky clean. Make our healthy eating goals a bit more “reachable.”

This sounds like airtight logic. What could be more logical? Sadly, life doesn’t seem to care much about logic, because lowering the healthy eating bar doesn’t work. You must’ve noticed this. No matter how moderate and mediocre you make your healthy eating goals, it still feels very… battley.

Why setting the healthy eating bar lower fails

That’s because setting your healthy eating sights lower doesn’t address the real issue. The real issue is not about how much kale you try to choke down yourself. The real issue is that you have a nasty tendency to beat the living crap out of yourself for “imperfections.” If you have that tendency, you’ll do it with super clean eating; you’ll do it with moderately clean eating, you’ll do it with pretty much anything.

The big tactical reframe

So here’s what you do. You boldly reframe healthy eating. You make up your mind that for you, yes, you’re going to start eating healthy for all the usual reasons. But the project of healthy eating is also going to be all about softening your tendency to beat the crap out of yourself.

You’ll still get all those other benefits of healthy eating—the health, the weight loss, the energy, all the perks. But healthy eating is also going to be an arena dedicated to healing your habits of aggravated self-assault.

A great way to start this process is to take in a boatload of wisdom about self-kindness and compassion—books, videos, whatever. Some people you could check out include Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, Cheri Huber, and Gabor Mate. Main line that shit. Bathe in it. Because you know one thing that people who feel compassion for themselves do? They eat healthy. But they do it in a way that feels more like a big cuddly hug than a battle.

The comic booky superpower of non-attachment

The more you get the hang of being more kind and gentle with yourself, the less attached you will be to perfection and ideals. And this non-attachment is a great power. That’s why pro sports teams pay big bucks to sports psychologists to come in and teach the athletes to be less—not more—attached to the outcomes. This actually (and counterintuitively) helps them perform much better. 

Non-attachment means yes, you do all the things you need to do to become a wildly regenerative eater, but you never invest your worth, value, or self-esteem in getting there. You are equally whole, lovable, and beautiful whether you eat pizza or fresh veggies. It just happens to make your body happier to eat the fresh veggies. Basically, you want to learn to become a healthy eater in the exact same way as a toddler learns to walk.

The wisdom of toddlers

Toddlers fall down a thousand times but they never beat themselves up. They just happily try again. Over and over and over. Each time they fall it’s just information. Think about that. You can learn to do the same thing when you have your slips, cheats, digressions, and backslides with healthy eating. Many things can help you do this—mindfulness practices, visualization, affirmations, therapy.

Being compassionate with your imperfections is a gigantic step in making healthy eating feel natural instead of like a constant battle. It’s a powerful foundation. But it’s often not enough. What’s that you ask? Do I have something to offer that, according to me, is in fact enough? Funny, you should ask.

Shameless plugs gone wild

To really make healthy eating feel natural, most people need an actual, real-world system. That’s why I spent 25 years creating the Wildly Regenerative Eating system—9 diabolical main tactics along with a whole arsenal of other funky little hints, hacks, and tips. 

You can jump into the Wildly Regenerative Eating system to permanently transform your eating through coaching (small group or one-on-one) or through my flagship book, Wildly Regenerative Eating: The ultimate guide to get yourself to eat absurd amounts of whole plants for vibrant health, tigery leanness, and shocking longevity.

Or you can do none of the above and just start being unreasonably and magnanimously kind to yourself when you eat icky foods. Or when you don’t. That also is awesome. Everyone in your life will thank you. You will thank yourself. Just like I’m going to thank you, right now, this very moment, for stopping by. 

May peace and grooviness be upon you and the horse you rode in on.