Episode 20: The Simplest Way to Eat Better: Follow the Healthy Plate Model
Healthy eating doesn’t have to be complicated or overwhelming. Learn how to keep things super simple with the Healthy Plate model.
One of the easiest ways to clean up your diet and eat healthy is to follow what I call the Healthy Plate Model.
I built this model a few years ago as a visual guide to help my clients put healthy foods on their plates at every meal.
This model is based in large part on the USDA’s MyPlate model which was published in 2015. It shows what your plate should look like at meal times according to four major food groups: vegetables (veggies), fruit, protein, and grains/starches.
Click below to download a printable version of the Healthy Plate model to keep in your kitchen as a reminder:
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Jayd (00:00):
The best and simplest way that you can lose weight, build muscle is to just follow generally a healthy diet. If you can master how to follow just a generally baseline level healthy diet, you'll be able to reach your goals. Once you master some very basic principles, it's all just fine tuning and optimizing from there.
(00:34)
Hey there. Welcome to the Coaching Corner podcast. I'm Jayd Harrison. I'm a personal trainer and health coach, and I've created this podcast to help you to eat better and build a body that you love. In today's episode, we're going to go over one of the simplest ways that you can clean up your diet and eat better. It's called the Healthy Plate Model, and it's a mixture of different models of healthy eating from the MyPlate model to the Harvard Plate model. Following this model will help you to choose the right foods every time that you sit down for a meal. The thing that I love most about the Healthy plate model is that it allows you to build a healthy plate at every meal without having to meticulously track everything that you eat and drink. Now, tracking is an important skill to master, especially when you are trying to change your eating pattern. But following a simple healthy plate model will allow you to get started and changing the habits that you need to change in order to eat better and give your body the nutrients that it needs. Following the healthy plate model will also roughly help you to eat the right amount of calories to sustain a healthy body weight. So without further ado, let's get into the episode.
(01:48)
So today I want to tell you about one of the easiest ways that you can clean up your diet and eat healthy. I know that there is a lot of garbage information out there on social media. There's always some kind of nutrition or fitness influencer who wants to tell you, don't eat this or check out this new superfood or check out this fad diet. I'm telling you, in my experience, and I've been in this world for a very long time, the best and simplest way that you can lose fat, burn weight, burn weight, burn fat, lose weight, build muscle is to just follow generally a healthy diet. If you can master how to follow just a generally baseline level healthy diet, you'll be able to reach your goals more or less. Once you master some very basic principles, it's all just fine tuning and optimizing from there.
(02:48)
And I think a lot of times these fitness and nutrition influencers, they are jumping the gun. They're putting the cart before the horse by focusing on all of these little things like, oh, you only eat this amount of this thing and only eat this amount of this thing and avoid this superfood, and then don't worry about if you're feeling overwhelmed with that stuff. Yeah. So I, and I live in this space. I've been in this industry for a long time. It hurts my brain how confusing in fitness influencers make this seem. It is not complicated. Okay. It's not complicated. I would say the hardest thing about eating healthy, at least in terms of speaking as an American, speaking as someone who lives in the West is what we have to combat is convenience foods, okay? Convenience. Foods that are not fresh, that are just packaged food with lots of added sugars, lots of added preservatives, lots of added junk.
(03:43)
But in general, if you can return to the roots of healthy eating and just follow some very basic principles, I guarantee you, you will make progress, especially if what you eat for the most part right now is a lot of restaurant food or packaged food or processed food. So I don't want to just say to you, don't eat this, don't eat that, because I don't actually think that that's helpful, and in fact, it kind of puts you in a negative mindset, and I don't want you to feel ashamed about what your food choices are. I want you to think more about abundance, eating more of X, Y, Z, filling your plate with X, Y, Z, increasing your intake of X, Y, Z. This is the type of language that I want you to take to your approach, to your diet, regardless of whether you're trying to burn fat or build muscle.
(04:39)
But I think especially if you're trying to burn fat, thinking more about, I can't have this, I can't have that, I shouldn't eat this, I need to eat less of this. All of these are negative mindset approaches towards your food that maybe will work in the short term for a little while, but eventually your brain and your body is going to rebel against that. Instead, I would encourage you to focus on increasing and developing more of a mindset of a abundance where you're trying to get more of the types of foods that are actually going to help you with your goal. So let's take a look at how we can very, very simply clean up your diet and get your body the right amount of fuel in general for maintaining for what your body would be a healthy weight and what's going to give your body the building blocks that it needs to actually build muscle and achieve a healthy body composition.
(05:35)
Honestly, the easiest way, the simplest way that I've been able to help my clients to build a healthier diet and make it more suitable towards fat loss or towards muscle gains is by following what I call the healthy plate model. And it looks like this. The healthy plate model is just a picture of what your plate should look like, that you generally want to use when you sit down to eat a meal, when you plan a meal in your kitchen that you're going to cook for yourself, or when you sit down at a restaurant, you want to use this as kind of a general guide. So according to the healthy plate model, you divide your plate in half a standard general dinner plate. We're not going to talk about exceptions to ginormous. We're not talking about those ginormous plates or potlucks and stuff. This is like a normal dinner plate.
(06:27)
Okay? So you divide the plate in half and on one half of the plate, you want to fill up that side of the plate with vegetables, either two servings of vegetables or a serving of vegetables and a serving of fruit. So half of what you eat, you want it to come from vegetables. That's the principle here. So vegetables, again, they're plants or they're parts of plants that you can eat. Now, fruits and grains are also plants and parts of plants, but we usually reserve the term vegetable for specific parts of the plant. So roots like carrots and turnips, these are vegetables, leaves like leafy greens, salad, lettuce, spinach. These are vegetables. The stems like celery. These are vegetables bulbs like garlic and onion are vegetables and flour, even like broccoli or artichoke. Now, vegetables are a good healthy source of carbohydrates and healthy fats, which are unsaturated fats.
(07:31)
So this is where we want the majority of our carbohydrate intake to come from vegetables and also from the grains or starches side of the plate, which we'll talk about next. Now, fruit is also a part of a plant, but it's a specific, it specifically refers to the part of the plant that has the seeds or is the ovary of the plant. These tend to have higher sugar, but it's natural sugar. So it's generally the type of sugar that is safe for you to eat because it comes buddied up with nutrients and dietary fiber that your body needs to be healthy. However, if you are in a fat loss phase, or if you're specifically focused on reducing your calories, you may want to just omit fruit and just go with another serving of vegetables, because in general with the higher sugar intake, fruits are going to be generally higher calorie than vegetables.
(08:23)
At the same time though, they're going to be lower calorie than eating a muffin or a bag of chips. So just like I try to stress for everybody, track what you eat, write it down, or enter it into MyFitnessPal to make sure that it fits within what your calorie goals are. But following this, just generally thinking about, I'm going to put on half of my plate vegetables or vegetables, and fruit is a great way to get your body the nutrition that it needs. Okay, so then on the other half of the plate, you have kind of roughly divided into fourths protein, which is the larger fourth. So you want to include a good source of protein. A lean source of protein is preferable. So sources of protein include things like animal products like meat, poultry, but you want to choose lean cuts of meat or lean mixes of ground meat or white meat like chicken and Turkey.
(09:21)
Breast egg whites are also a great source of protein as well as fish and plant protein. Sources of protein include things like tofu, tempe, edamame, and beans, legumes, lentils. So these are all great sources of protein, and you want to make sure that you're including them at every meal. In general, you want 20% of your daily calories to come from protein. Protein is super important to help your body, to build muscle and to repair a damaged tissue. It helps to keep your immune system boosted, and it also will help you if you are in a fat loss phase. Protein dense foods protein is generally pretty satiating. It fills your belly, and especially if you're eating low lean sources of protein, you're going to get full off of relatively lower calories. And then on the other last fourth of the plate is your grains and your starches.
(10:19)
So grains and starchy vegetables, namely. So your grains are things like foods that are made from wheat, like bread and pasta. It also includes rice, quinoa, oats, and other types of grains, barley, pharaoh and whatnot. But this also includes specific types of vegetables, the types of vegetables that are high in starches. That means potatoes, yucca, plantains, corn. These are starchy vegetables. They tend to be higher calorie, and that's why we generally want to restrict them to this fourth of the plate rather than being on the other side and being half the plate. And for people who are sensitive to blood sugar spikes, like people with type two diabetes, you may want to avoid putting starchy foods on your plate. Although the American Diabetes Association nowadays kind of recommends everybody needs to have sort of an individualized plan, just keep an eye on your blood sugar levels.
(11:27)
Some starchy foods may affect your insulin, others may not affect it quite so much, so just kind of keep an eye on all of that. But yeah, in general, this is kind of the guidance that you want to follow when you are building a healthy plate, when you're cooking at home, when you're at a restaurant, this is generally what you want to follow, and if you follow this model for most of your meals, you're generally going to have a pretty healthy diet, and you can do that without having to track what you eat, which for some people is not really a great option. A lot of people don't like to track what they eat in MyFitnessPal or keep a food journal. That is arguably one of the best ways that you can keep track of your calorie intake or if you're trying to hone in on something specific in your diet.
(12:16)
But that's not something that you have to do all the time, and again, it's not really something that everybody has to do, but you can still clean up your diet and make gains and burn fat if you follow this model. So this model I actually sort of created, it's a modified version of the MyPlate model that came out with the 2015 guidelines for, or the 2015 dietary guidelines for Americans. It's also informed by the Harvard Healthy Plate Model, so there's a couple of different models out there for how to structure your plate, and all of them have their benefits. This is what I use for my clients. This is what I teach. I go into much more detail on this in my Healthy Diet Makeover program, which you can find on my website, and I'll link in the show notes. The Healthy Diet Makeover program is a five-step program.
(13:10)
It's very quick. You can do it in two weekends to help you to structure your diet in a way that fits your fitness goals. You can find more information on that. There's an entire module on the Healthy Plate where we go into much more detail about how to select good sources of lean protein, how to find vegetable dishes that you like and that fit within your calorie goals. We also go into the other details of how many calories you should eat, how many grams of protein, et cetera. All of that is in my Healthy Diet Makeover program, so you can find information for that in the links in the show notes. I recommend actually keeping this image in mind, but also printing it out and keeping it in your kitchen so that when you're planning your meals and you're setting something up for lunch or for dinner or for breakfast, you can just look up at the healthy plate model that's on your fridge or on your cabinet for a quick reference and to help remind you how to put healthy food on your plate.
(14:13)
And there is a downloadable, there's a printable version that you can download from my website, and I'll include the link to that in the show notes. But yeah, so those are my tips for how to very, very simply, without having to track what you eat and without having to do too much, you can follow this as a very simple way to clean up your diet. But if you need more information, if you need more support, if you want to go a little bit deeper into any one part of how to follow the Healthy Plate model or other aspects of eating healthy, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program, and you can also apply for one-on-one coaching, and also make sure to sign up for my email list and make sure to check that you are interested in emails about nutrition tips, because that's the group that I send a lot more information on eating healthy and building a healthy plate too. All of that you can find on my website and in the show notes to this episode.
(15:18)
Thank you so much for watching or listening to this episode. Again, I'm Jayd Harrison, AKA Jaydigains. I hope that you found this information helpful. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever it is that you're listening or watching. You'll get notified every time I drop a new episode and also check out my social media. I'm Jaydigains everywhere. If you would like to ask fitness questions live, I go live on my Twitch channel on Tuesday afternoons and answer fitness questions. They also do a technique review and get my own workout in, so please feel free to join me there. That's Twitch.tv/jaydigains. Give me a follow to get notified whenever I go live. Thank you so much again. I will see you in the next episode. In the meantime, make sure that you're following the healthy plate model, getting in those veggies, getting in that protein and drinking water, and of course, prioritizing your self-care, and I'll see you soon.
Know Your Food Groups
What I love most about the Healthy Plate model is its simplicity and adaptability. Keeping the Healthy Plate graphic in mind, there are infinite combinations of healthy meals that you could create. All you have to do is know your food groups:
Veggies (Vegetables)
On half of your plate, include 1-2 servings of veggies. Veggies (or vegetables) are plants (or parts of plants) that you can eat. Fruits and grains are also plants, but we usually reserve the term “vegetable” for specific parts of the plant like the roots (like carrots and turnips), leaves (like lettuce and spinach), stems (like celery), bulbs (like garlic and onion), and flowers (like broccoli). Veggies are a great source of carbohydrates and healthy fats (i.e., unsaturated fats).
Fruit
Fruits are plant products that tend to be higher in sugar content, giving them a sweet taste. This group is optional and can take up 1 portion of the vegetable side of your plate. They include things like berries, cherries, apples, grapes, pears, and mangoes. The higher sugar and calorie content of fruits make them a food to be eaten in moderation–no more than a quarter of your plate at meal times.
Protein
On at least a quarter of your plate, include a lean source of protein. Protein is both a source of energy for your body and a building block for your body tissues (like muscle). Eating a high-protein diet will help your body to more efficiently build muscle and keep your metabolism boosted (high-protein in this context means 20% of your daily calories come from protein). Prioritize lean sources of protein–items that come with little to no saturated fat like white meat (chicken breast & turkey breast), egg whites, fish, plant protein sources (tofu, tempeh, & edamame), and lean cuts of red meat.
Grains/Starches
On the remaining quarter of your plate, include a grain or starchy food. Grains are essentially seeds and include foods made from wheat (bread & pasta), rice, quinoa, and oats. Try to include whole grains as much as possible (things like brown rice, oatmeal, whole wheat, quinoa, etc) in place of refined grains (white wheat, white bread, or white rice). Whole grains are more generally more nutritious, having more vitamins, minerals, and dietary fiber than refined grains.
Some vegetables (like potatoes, corn, yuca, and plantains) are high in Starches (complex carbohydrates). Starchy vegetables tend to be high-calorie, and may not be suitable for every diet (for example, people with Type II Diabetes may want to avoid them). These kinds of vegetables should be limited to no more than a quarter of your plate, especially if you are trying to burn fat.
Tips for Building a Healthy Plate
When you first start to practice the Healthy Plate model, you’ll likely need to experiment a lot to find what recipes you like and what works best for you.
Cookbooks are a great resource that may already be in your kitchen or bookshelf at home. General cookbooks like the Better Homes & Gardens New Cookbook and Betty Crocker’s Cookbook have entire chapters devoted to vegetable-based dishes, meat, breads, pastas, and more. Specialty cookbooks like the America’s Test Kitchen Complete Vegetarian Cookbook are full of recipes dedicated to one of the major food groups.
Online recipes are another easy and accessible resource. The MyPlate Kitchen website has tons of recipes, videos, and other resources to help you build healthy plates at home. Another great tool is allrecipes.com—a site that allows you to search for healthy recipes using whatever ingredients you’d like to use. It also has plenty of cooking tips and meal ideas to browse and is updated pretty regularly!
You can also check out my recipe collections available here on my website. I update these collections every few months according to the most popular or requested recipes.
For more guidance on building a healthy diet, check out my Healthy Diet Makeover program. This short course can be done in as little as two weeks, during which you’ll learn more about building a healthy plate and how to eat to reach your fitness goals. Click below to learn more!
Clean up your diet in 5 simple steps!
ABOUT ME
Hey there! 👋 I’m Jayd Harrison (Jaydigains), and I’m a personal trainer and health coach. I help people build muscle, burn fat, and clean up their diets with my online coaching programs. Check out some of my coaching videos on Youtube, or join me live on Twitch and follow on social media:
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