Tips for Successfully Implementing the Mediterranean Diet
The Mediterranean Diet is known worldwide as one of the healthiest ways of eating. It reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease, and implementing it can help you maintain a healthy weight, protect brain health, and promote healthy aging.
What sets the Mediterranean Diet apart from most other diets is that the focus is on filling up on nutritious nourishing foods rather than hyper-fixating on restrictions that are often hard to sustain and not always healthy. It’s a lifestyle prioritizing high-quality food, rest, movement, and time spent with loved ones.
This means you’ll not only feel great and reap some amazing health benefits, but you’ll also get to enjoy great food and company while doing it. It’s truly a sustainable holistic approach to wellness, and chances are once you get the hang of it, you’ll never want to turn back.
Here are the most important tips for successfully implementing the Mediterranean Diet so you can enjoy food freedom and great health.
Mediterranean Diet Overview
The Mediterranean Diet doesn’t have strict rules in the way most fad diets do. Instead, it’s an approximate pattern of eating followed by several traditional cultures surrounding the Mediterranean Sea.
The most important guidelines for the diet are food group balance, plenty of fresh produce, mostly unprocessed foods, healthy fats, whole grains, and moderate consumption of animal products.
These principles can be followed using traditional ingredients from the Mediterranean, or the guidelines can be applied to foods sourced from anywhere in the world.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to healthy eating, and the Mediterranean Diet is a flexible approach that allows for plenty of personalization based on your location, preferences, and lifestyle.
How To Begin Following the Mediterranean Diet
The first phase of transitioning to a more Mediterranean style of eating can feel overwhelming. It takes time to learn new food guidelines, discover new ingredients, and learn how to prepare enjoyable meals from them. It certainly won’t happen overnight.
It’s far better to take a slow and steady approach to improving your diet and adopting the Mediterranean Diet principles. This will ensure it truly becomes a new and consistent lifestyle instead of a momentary phase.
Perhaps the toughest pill to swallow is that you’ll need to learn how to cook at least a few basic dishes. One of the most important elements of the diet is using whole fresh ingredients that are as unprocessed as possible, and this means you’ll need to learn how to prepare them unless you want to only eat salads for the rest of your life (not recommended).
This doesn’t mean every meal needs to be entirely from scratch or that you have no convenience food options. There’s a broad spectrum between home-cooked and takeout, and where you want to end up on that scale is up to you.
However, a few non-negotiable skills to master will be cooking grains or pastas, roasting vegetables and meat, cutting up produce, and perhaps even learning to make a few simple sauces, dips, or salad dressings.
Practical Tips for a Smooth Transition
Add Fruits, Vegetables, and Legumes to Meals
When implementing the Mediterranean Diet, it’s helpful to focus on “adding” rather than taking away. This means instead of immediately cutting out all your favorite foods you usually eat, you can find healthy Mediterranean inspired ingredients to add to them.
This could be incorporating more vegetables and fruits into each meal, or adding legumes to a salad to increase fiber and satiety (the feeling of being full). The idea is that the more you fill up on nourishing foods that satisfy, the less room and desire you’ll have for foods that don’t support your health goals and often contribute to weight gain.
Swap Ingredients for More Mediterranean Friendly Options
Another easy way to start adopting a Mediterranean Diet is to simply swap out or “upgrade” your usual ingredients. An example of this could be ditching your usual store-bought salad dressing full of highly processed oils and additives for a simple olive oil and vinegar dressing.
You could also upgrade your usual highly processed meats like breaded chicken, deli meats, and burgers for simple cuts like chicken breast, salmon filets, or lean ground beef. Highly refined carbohydrate sources like white breads and pastas should also take a backseat to whole grains like farro, whole grain rice, oats, and couscous.
Gradually Learn New Recipes
Adding 3 new recipes to your routine each day will quickly become exhausting. Instead, it makes much more sense to learn recipes one at a time until you’re comfortable with them. The more you repeat them, the more effortless they’ll be to make, so try not to switch it up too much at first.
You might focus on one specific meal you want to upgrade at a time before concerning yourself with the entirety of your diet. This could look like preparing a chicken tzatziki bowl for dinner a few times a week for a while before eventually learning a quick pasta salad recipe for lunches.
Be sure to experiment enough to find dishes you genuinely enjoy, and these can become your own personal meal rotation staples.
Master The Art of Meal Prepping
Last but not least, one of the best ways to eat healthy with minimal fuss is to optimize your time in the kitchen by meal prepping. Chances are, you don’t have time to cook 3 times a day every single day, but meal prepping still makes it possible to enjoy wholesome food on the days you’re short on time.
Meal prepping can look like perfectly prepared and ready-to-eat meals made ahead of time, but more often a casual approach is easier to implement. One strategy is simply to cook extra portions for every recipe you make so that you have leftovers to freeze or eat within the next few days.
Another common method of meal prep is to batch-cook basic items like rice or plain chicken ahead of time so that you can easily use them in different meals throughout the week. Sauces and dressings are another smart item to make in advance since they’re generally versatile enough to mix and match with several different meals.
A Final Note
With all of these tips in mind, perhaps the most important one is that you don’t need to be “perfect”. There’s no golden standard you have to reach and no right or wrong way of getting there.
Instead of aiming for an ideal diet, focus on small improvements every week or so. This is far more likely to lead to great results, and it eases the stress of perfectionism which usually functions more like a stumbling block than a motivator. After all, the whole point of the Mediterranean Diet is to find balance.
