What are unhealthy eating habits?

Unhealthy eating habits include consuming excessive amounts of processed and high-calorie foods, skipping meals, eating irregularly, overeating, and not getting enough fruits and vegetables in your diet. It can lead to various health problems such as obesity, heart disease, and diabetes.

Why do I struggle to eat healthy?

Several factors can contribute to struggling with healthy eating habits, including lack of knowledge or skills for meal planning and preparation, emotional eating, social pressures, and busy lifestyles. Identifying the root cause of your struggle and seeking support from a healthcare professional or a registered dietitian can help you overcome these challenges.

Is it too late to start eating healthy?

It's never too late to start eating healthy. Even small changes in your diet can lead to significant improvements in your health. Incorporating more fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, and whole grains into your meals and reducing processed and high-calorie foods can help you achieve a healthier and more balanced diet.

What is the Ancestral Wisdom Model?

The Ancestral Wisdom Model is a solution to unhealthy eating habits that involves eating like our ancestors did, prioritizing minimally processed foods, avoiding added sugars, and emphasizing plant-based foods, medicinal herbs, and the mind-body connection to heal.

Melinda Penny-Washington RDN, LD, CDCES
- Mar 18
- 8 min read

How Can I Eat Healthy?

Updated: Mar 21

Keto, low carb, vegan, intermittent fasting, on and on. If you have heard of these diets, there is a good chance you are confused about what to eat. Which diet is healthy? Which is not? Which one confers the best health outcomes? Which one can you actually follow for the long haul?

If you are anything like me, you are probably tired of all the confusion about what to eat. Like most of us, I know the importance of a wholesome, balanced diet, but often find myself so overwhelmed by all the mixed messages on what I should or shouldn’t be eating that I don’t know where to begin.

First, know it’s not your fault that you are so confused about how you should eat and why you eat the way you do. I decided to research some of the core reasons why we eat how we eat today and have learned there are three primary issues that shape our eating patterns:

processed food
unhealthy body image
diet culture

With a culture that constantly tells us to achieve more and look glamorous on social media, it’s really no wonder so many of us feel less than motivated to make dietary changes, but with a deeper understanding of how these three factors influence our eating habits, we can finally take control and learn to eat in a way that is truly healthy.

Highlights

Processed food, unhealthy body image, and diet culture are the three primary issues that shape our eating patterns.

The Ancestral Wisdom Model is a viable, simple solution to this ever-growing problem.

Food processing and body image issues continue to affect our food ecosystem and self-esteem.

How To Stop Unhealthy Eating Habits

If you are like me and are tired of diets that don’t work, you might be relieved to know there is a way to break unhealthy eating habits that don’t involve constant restriction, hunger, or obsession with calories.

But how can you do this and still be healthy?

Ancestral Wisdom Model: A Solution to the Problem

When you think about how your great-great-grandparents might have eaten, a clearer picture begins to unfold of how this is possible. Our ancestors did not eat “diet” food or count calories; yet, prior to the 1960s obesity was rarely a problem.

Our ancestors also didn’t have LA Fitness memberships, Fitbits, or Smart Watches, and yet they were largely unaffected by the diseases that plague us today like obesity, type two diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.

So, what gives? How could they be so healthy? After all, it's not as if people simply had more willpower back then than they do today. Diet culture always puts the blame back on us. We eat too much. We don’t exercise.

Take personal responsibility. It's all us, us, us, but do you really think humans simply stopped having willpower a half-century ago? Of course not. Our DNA is largely unchanged. What has changed is our environment, which includes both our food environment and our entire culture around eating.

Eating Like Our Ancestors: A Model for Healthy Living

Our ancestors used wisdom to guide their eating choices. They ate foods that looked the way they did when they grew out of the earth. Foods were minimally processed. Snacking all day was not a thing. People thrived on many different types of diets.

Like in Okinawa, Japan where the diet is more than 85 percent carbohydrate, and yet there is virtually no diabetes or obesity, or the Inuit who thrived on seal and whale blubber and did not suffer the assumed affliction of heart disease. Both cultures managed to stay healthy despite drastic differences in their diets for a few simple reasons.

First, there was no ultra-processed food.
Second, there was very little added sugar in their diets.
Third, every culture placed a strong emphasis on plant-based foods, medicinal herbs, and the mind-body connection to healing.

Food was viewed as more than sustenance but as medicine. It was used to effectively manage many conditions ranging from obesity to diabetes. This style of eating reflects just part of what is deemed The Ancestral Wisdom Health Model, which as you will learn, is the key to eating healthy without restriction.

As we explore the origins of packaged food, unhealthy body image, and diet culture, you will soon begin to connect the dots as to why our eating habits have changed so dramatically over the last few decades and how we can get back to our origins.

How Processed Food Affects Your Body

Our ancestors evolved on a varied and colorful diet of fruits, vegetables, legumes, roots, spices, herbs, beans, fish, ancient grains like einkorn and quinoa, and greens. Today, this diet has been largely replaced by the monochrome, uniform foods designed to be shelf-stable and taste amazing so that we buy more, with health as an afterthought.