Balanced diet: What does it look like?

A truly balanced healthy diet doesn’t restrict you from entire food groups or place rigid rules and restrictions on how you should or shouldn’t eat.

It incorporates all foods as part of your lifestyle, whether the more health-promoting whole foods or the occasional sweet dessert.

This may sound surprising, but there’s a misconception that you must eat ‘clean’ and only eat healthy foods like fruits, vegetables, and oily fish.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, consuming a diet based on whole foods will promote good health, but this doesn’t mean you can only eat foods considered ‘healthy’.

Developing a positive relationship with food, one where all foods can be considered part of a balanced diet and lifestyle, is where we want to get to.

From Second Nature’s perspective, a balanced diet encourages the consumption of:

• High-quality protein sources: Fish, meat, eggs, tofu, tempeh, yoghurt, cheese, and seafood.
• Fat from whole foods: Meat, fish, eggs, dairy products (rich in calcium), nuts, seeds, avocado, and extra virgin olive oil.
• High-fibre carbohydrates: Whole grains like quinoa and brown rice, sweet potato, white potatoes, pumpkin, legumes like lentils, chickpeas, beans, and butternut squash.
• Fruits and vegetables: Take your pick!

We also encourage limiting the following foods, but they can still be included from time to time:

• Refined carbohydrates: White rice, breakfast cereals, supermarket bread.
• Added sugar: Fruit juice or added into drinks or meals.
• Refined oils: Sunflower and vegetable oils.
• Ultra-processed foods: Pastries, low-calorie/low-fat products, microwave meals, fast food, breakfast cereals, frozen pizzas, and frozen desserts.
• Trans fats.

Alongside the food, we encourage some healthy habits to support a balanced diet:

• Eat three meals a day: This will help keep your hunger pangs at bay to help you achieve a healthy weight.
• Eat until you’re comfortably full: You’ll know when you’ve had enough by tuning into your physical hunger cues to avoid weight gain.
• Enjoy healthy snacks when needed: Sometimes, you’ll have more extended periods between meals. A healthy snack, such as an apple and peanut butter, can tie you over until your next main meal.
• Don’t count calories or track macros: We don’t believe you need to count and track what you’re eating to maintain a healthy balance. It’s not just tedious, but good evidence suggests other approaches are as effective at supporting weight management and health.
• Stay hydrated: 1-2l of water a day will keep your body functioning well and the hunger pangs at bay.
• Eat mindfully: By paying attention to your food and being free from distraction, you’re more likely to eat until you’re comfortably full.
• Home-baking: While we don’t actively encourage the excess consumption of sweet foods, we feel that by making them yourself, you’re more likely to develop a healthy relationship with those ingredients and enjoy it mindfully.

The world of diet and nutrition is a complicated space to navigate. With so many different diets, knowing which one to choose is challenging. Should you go on a keto diet? A Mediterranean diet? Vegan? Why not try a carnivore for a month?

Diets often fail due to adherence. The truth is people find it too challenging to stick to rigid rules and restrictions that often come as part of the package of the diet you’re on at the time.

Then when you veer outside of the rules of the diet, you feel like you’ve failed, you feel guilty, you feel it’s your fault, and you ‘fall off the wagon’.

However, you haven’t failed at all. The diet has failed you – and any future diet you try, even if you find short-term success, will probably fail in the long run.

At Second Nature, we want to focus on what you’re adding to your life rather than what you’re taking away.

You’re including a wide variety of foods in your diet, adding more energy to your body and mind. You’re more productive, happier, and more capable of dealing with life’s many ups and downs.

Second Nature isn’t a diet. It’s a way of living, and if you’d like to join over 150,000 others who are now enjoying numerous health benefits, click here to take our health quiz.

Otherwise, keep reading as we look at three habits you can start today to help you build a balanced diet to help you achieve your health goals, whether that’s weight loss or simply feeling healthier.

Step 1: Balance your plate

The first step to developing a balanced diet is learning how to build your meals to ensure they contain everything your body needs.

We recommend the majority of your meals contain around:

• 25% high-fibre carbohydrates
• 25% protein
• 50% non-starchy vegetables (or one to two portions of fruit)
• At least one serving of fat

You can see an example of how this looks with our creamy chicken and mushroom stroganoff with steamed kale and boiled potatoes with a dash of melted butter.

Plating up

When you’re cooking for multiple people or your whole family, it can be highly tedious trying to measure out the exact servings as you’re cooking. We recommend using our hand portion guide when you’re serving your meals.

This way, you’re saving time when you’re cooking and ensuring that you’re cooking enough for everyone, and you can then serve up the right amount for your plate. Any leftovers can be put into the fridge or freezer to save you cooking time across the week.

Here’s how it might look from start to finish.

Start by serving up one fist-sized portion of carbohydrates: For this meal, it’s hand-cut chips.

Then serve one palm-sized portion of protein: For this meal, it’s a griddled steak.

Followed by two palm-sized portions of vegetables: For this meal, it’s a mixed-vegetable salad.

Finally, you can add a minimum of one thumb-sized portion of fat (add one or two more if you feel you need to): For this meal, it’s walnuts, and you could add some extra virgin olive oil as a dressing.

A day’s balanced intake

So far, we’ve covered what the overall balance of your meals should look like and how to serve up your meals. Now, let’s look at what a whole day might look like.

Breakfast

Some breakfasts might be sweet and contain fruit, while others might be savoury and contain roasted or sauteed vegetables. Either way, the same guidelines apply.

You might find that some meals are more carb-heavy than others (the porridge) and others contain more fat (the omelette), which is perfectly fine.

You don’t need to feel like every meal is the perfect balance of carbs and fat, it can change meal-to-meal, and we encourage you to experiment.

This flexibility might relieve some of the stress of a meal, knowing they don’t always have to contain a portion of carbs, and your fat intake might be higher, for example.

Lunch

The following meals are both using chicken as their source of protein. However, this can easily be replaced by tofu or tempeh if you’re on a plant-based diet (vegan or vegetarian).

We’d recommend using extra virgin olive oil as your source of fat in the bean stew and cold-pressed rapeseed or cold-pressed sesame seed oil for the nutty Asian salad.

Dinner

These meals again use chicken as their source of protein, but tofu or tempeh would be a great substitute. Paneer or halloumi would also work well in both recipes for vegetarians who consume dairy foods.

Based on science

Our approach is based on the latest nutrition and health science research to manage obesity, type 2 diabetes, and lower your risk of heart disease (our programme has also been shown to be effective at treating high blood pressure).

Our in-house registered dietitians and nutritionists have spent the past five years developing and improving our dietary guidelines to be as health-promoting and flexible as possible.

Don’t just take our word for it; the NHS has commissioned us to deliver programmes for people living with type 2 diabetes and obesity since 2017.

For a quick summary of why we’ve chosen this approach to food and nutrition, watch this short video:

If you’d like to read through some of the science yourself, here’s a list of critical references to support our approach to nutrition:

• Systematic review and meta-analysis of different dietary approaches to the management of type 2 diabetes
• Glycemic Index, Glycemic Load, Carbohydrates, and Type 2 Diabetes: Systematic review and dose–response meta-analysis of prospective studies
• Efficacy and safety of low and very low carbohydrate diets for type 2 diabetes remission: systematic review and meta-analysis of published and unpublished randomized trial data
• Weight Loss with a Low-Carbohydrate, Mediterranean, or Low-Fat Diet