Setting goals is easy, but prioritizing them is hard. Humans suck at properly weighing what we need to achieve our goals. We take on too much, skip steps, and often, as a result, we give up. Once you commit to a framework to prioritize your goals and cut the junk, achieving your goals gets a lot more realistic. Here's one way to do it.

If you're anything like me you have a ton of goals. Unfortunately, compulsive goal setting can be a major roadblock to actually achieving goals. Applying a rigorous approach to your goal setting is not only a great way to help you along the path to meeting them, but it's also a way to prune out all the junk you don't really need. We've talked before about how writing down all your goals is a good way to prioritize and that's essentially what we're doing here. However, instead of listing them we're going to categorize and compare them with a simple pyramid structure. (Think a little like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, but for your goals.) By the end you'll have weeded out unnecessary steps and ditched goals you don't really care about.

Consider this a system of life designing that helps you question assumptions and figure out what you really want. I've put together a Google Doc you can copy and fill in on your own (File > Make a copy). Here's how I divided the different goals up.

Level 1: The Primary Goals

Your primary goals are the base of all other goals—the one or two things you aspire to do before you die. Nearly everything above this bottom level should help you to one day complete these goals. Write in the goals that will truly matter to you in 20 years. It might be something like: live happily into your 90's or become the CEO of a company. You should only have two or three high stakes goals listed here that you'll design the rest of your life around.

Level 2: Long Term Goals

Your long term goals are the major goals that are required to get to the primary goals. These might be the sustainable habits you need to form over the years or the achievements you want to reach in order to get to your primary goals. Say your primary goal is to still be healthy and mobile in your 90's. You can't get to that point without working for it so a long term goal would be to lose (or gain) a certain amount of weight or improve your diet by your 50's.

Level 3: Short Term Goals

Think of short term goals as weeks or months out. Consider goals like: finish a drawing, build a deck addition, or cut cookies from your diet. The important part to remember is that these goals are short term, not short-sighted. So if you're primary goal is to lose weight think of what you can do now to make that happen. If it's to put on a show in an art gallery you need to finish a picture first.

Level 4: Recurring Goals

Your recurring goals are what you want to do daily/weekly/monthly regardless of what else is going on. Consider goals like: hit up the gym, jog, write a page a day, or anything similar. These aren't quite the same as short-term goals because they're to form a habit. Say one of your primary goals is to lower your daily stress level. Ask yourself what you need to do on a daily basis to make that happen in the long run (if you need some starter tips be sure to check out post on what you can do about your stress).

Level 5: Immediate Goals

These are the goals and to-dos that you can and want to accomplish right this second. As you write your list out you probably notice a few things you could be doing instead of writing your list. This is the ever-changing but necessary part of your pyramid because it allows you to measure your daily duties to see how they have an affect on your overall life goals. This could be as simple as cleaning the bathroom, or making a phone call. The purpose of including these here is to see where they affect other aspects of the pyramid both positively and negatively.

How to Use Your Pyramid to Weed Out Junk and Accomplish Your Goals

Now comes the hard part: turn this pyramid into an actionable living plan where you can prioritize and use your base goals as a foundation for everything else. As author David Foster Wallace points on in his Kenyon College commencement speech, life consists of what you pay attention to and you can structure your goals the same way. When you have too many goals conflicting with each other your attention is shifted too often. Trim away junk goals to get things done and find an actionable path.

Trim the Junk Away and Focus On As Few Goals as Possible

The goal of the pyramid is to ensure that every aspect of your goals work together. In that way it works a lot like the old food guide pyramid. The benefit of the pyramid is that you can see where your ideas fail and aren't coalescing. Let's get rid of everything that doesn't play nice together.

1. Start at the bottom of your pyramid and draw lines up through goals that match each other. For instance, at the bottom in your primary goals you might have "Publish a novel." In the long term goals you have "Write a novel," and near the top you have something like, "Write the first sentence of a novel." The line should move through each level and hit one or two different goals along the way.
2. Do this with all your goals moving upwards through the pyramid.
3. When you're done you'll probably have a few outliers scattered about. Ask yourself a couple questions about them: Why do I want this? Does this relate to anything else I want? If you don't have a good answer, cut them from the list. If you want to keep goals then focus them to help you with another goal.
4. Finally, go back through your levels and see what goals you can outsource to other people. You might be surprised at how many unnecessary steps you give yourself.

As an example, here's what I did for one of my goals. The primary goal at the bottom is: make and publish a video game. Along the path I had all sorts of pipedream goals: learn how to do pixel art, improve my shotty programming skills, write design documents, and more. When I saw all this in one image I realized I made it impossible for myself. I looked at each level and cut away everything I knew I wouldn't do. Did I really need to learn programming? No, because I know plenty of people who do it. Art? Nope, I know people who do that as well. Instead of learning five new skills I reduced it one goal: work with people I know.

By the end of this you should have a cohesive underlying framework where all your goals and wants work together in a manageable fashion. It's time to get started on accomplishing your goals.

Formulate a Plan and Get Started

You've trimmed away all the fat and nonsense so it's time to formulate a plan to achieve your goals. It's thought that smaller goals lead to a higher success rate and being very specific with those goals helps you achieve them. Thankfully your pyramid should already be filled with specifics so it's just about management now.

Planning out the process depends on how you like to do things. We've pointed out before that broadcasting your goal progress in public is a great way to keep yourself on track, highlighted some great goal tracking services, project management tools, and pointed out that sometimes you just need to suck it up and start. Find a system that works for you and get to it.

However you choose to plan your goals the point remains the same: focus only on the goals that matter, break them into smaller steps, and start work immediately. This is a one-time exercise that isn't about constant organization. You can tinker and tweak with each level as you go along, but stick with the basic high stakes structure if you really want to accomplish everything. Photo by Dan Zen.

Goals are ambiguous things that we as humans struggle to define and work toward. Hopefully the above method will provide the framework to create a path to where you want to end up. Be sure to share your own tips for organizing goals in the comments.

Title photo by Olivier Le Moal (Shutterstock.

Michael Jordan wore his college team's shorts underneath his Bulls uniform because he believed it brought him good luck. If six NBA championships can be considered proof, his superstition worked. It sounds silly (well, it is silly), but it's not all magic. Absurd as superstitions may seem, psychologists have an explanation for why it's not so far-fetched to believe a lucky charm can make you perform better.

Superstitions can range from small behavioral choices (like always putting on your right shoe first) to more extreme decisions (say you avoid the number 13 at all costs). The most curious thing about these superstitions is that they actually work and can alter your behavior, boost your performance, and help you achieve your goals.

To get a grasp on why we believe in superstitions—and how superstition and placebos manage to have measurable positive effects—I talked with Dr. Stuart Vyse, Professor of Psychology at Connecticut College, and author of Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition, and Matthew Hutson, science writer and author of The 7 Laws of Magical Thinking: How Irrational Beliefs Keep Us Happy, Healthy, and Sane.

Let's start by taking a look at why we believe in superstitions to begin with before we move onto the reasons why you should sometimes embrace them (and be wary of getting too attached to them).

Why Superstitions and Placebos Change Your Behavior

We should get a working definition of superstition here, because on its own, it's a broad term that encompasses a whole slew of magical thinking. Both Dr. Vyse and Matthew Hudson provided similar definitions, so we'll cobble them together into one:

A superstition is a belief or behavior that's inconsistent with conventional science and attributes functional mental properties into non-mental phenomenon. Essentially, a superstition is a belief that the universe is always watching you and changes depending on your actions or what you're holding. Sounds ridiculous, right? So let's look at why we believe them.

Why We Believe in Superstitions

At their core, superstitions are self-fulfilling prophesies. You plant an idea in your head, allow yourself to believe in magic, and then believe doing something in a particular way or wearing a trinket will help you perform better. This seems insane, but it's a common phenomenon. We have different theories as to why we believe in superstitions, even though most people know they're entirely made-up. Dr. Vyse explains:

There are a couple primary reasons. One is that people teach them to us when we're young. They're part of the lore of any culture. The basic process of socialization is a major part of it.

Also, we live in a world where there are always going to be important things in our lives that we can't completely control and their outcome is uncertain. Superstitions tend to emerge in those contexts. You do everything you possibly can to ensure that things will work out. Superstitions are employed as one more thing to help you bring [a desired outcome] about. They're maintained in part by a phenomenon psychologists call the "illusion of control." In certain circumstances if you perform some action that can't possibly affect the outcome in any real sense, you have the feeling that you have control and that feels good—better than just sitting and waiting.

Another theory is based on the idea of the "illusion of control," but as Hudson points out, it's about making sense of the world:

One common theme is pattern-recognition. People are very good at seeing patterns in the world. It's how we learn. It's how we get by. We're so good that we see patterns even when they're not there. Coincidences pop out at us all the time, and we immediately try to find an explanation for these patterns. Oftentimes we rely on these mystical forces that try to explain the things we see. Maybe you made this thing happen or the universe made this thing happen as a sign to you to improve your life.

As far as the origin of these beliefs, one thought is that we evolved to believe in superstitions based on these pattern recognitions. In an article in New Scientist evolutionary biologist Kevin Foster suggests we learned superstitions based on the need to survive:

In general, an animal must balance the cost of being right with the cost of being wrong. Throw in the chances that a real lion, and not wind, makes [a] rustling sound, and you can predict superstitious beliefs.

Essentially, you have superstitions because you want to believe that you can change your fate, that a little magic in your routine can change the outcome of an event, and because you need a little confidence boost. It's not a bad thing to believe in superstitions and as we'll see in later sections, believing in them can actually boost your performance. Photo by Mykl Roventine.

How Placebos Can Boost Mind and Body Performance

It's worth talking briefly about placebos here because superstitions can almost be thought of as placebos. This is especially the case when an object is imbued with properties to heal or give you luck. When you take a placebo your brain can respond by releasing dopamine. On top of other things, dopamine triggers the reward center of the brain and in turn can change a mood. Having a reaction to a placebo is commonly referred to as the placebo effect, something everyone's heard of.

Like superstitions, the placebo effect can generate a subjective outcome. If you believe in an outcome then when it happens you'll connect that to what you did before (wore a good luck charm or took a fake-pill). In some ways the difference between a placebo and a superstition is tiny. Take, for instance, people's insistence that Vitamin C and Echinacea prevent colds, despite no scientific evidence existing for either. Dr. Howard Brody explains this to Psychology Today:

We know that among the variables in human function that appears readily able to respond to the placebo effect is IgA-the immunoglobulin that is present in mouth and nose mucus that provides the first line of defense against germs like cold viruses. So we might postulate (but cannot prove) that these "placebos" stimulate IgA production, and thereby actually do help reduce the number of colds people suffer, without any "direct" chemical effect taking place— i.e. the placebo effect at work. So in this instance we have a clear mechanism by which placebos could work for prevention.

Additionally, as the author at Psychology Today, Steven Kotier points out in his own story, the differences between a placebo and a superstition are hard to define sometimes:

When I was fifteen years old, I split my patella in a skiing accident. There's nothing to do for a split patella other than wait. And don a knee sleeve. I wore mine clear into my thirties. Whenever I went skiing, the sleeve went with me. Nevermind that the patella was all healed up by the time I got out of college; I found that on the days I went naked, the knee consistently throbbed.

The point is that when you believe doing something to make a difference in an outcome—like taking a fake pill, alternative medicines, wearing a knee sleeve, or knocking on wood—it can increase the chances of a positive outcome. You can actually trigger certain responses in the brain and body that help you meet a certain goal. Photo by Anders Sandberg.

When Rituals Turn Into Superstitions

So we have a good understanding of why we believe in superstitions and in turn, how placebos work in a similar fashion. What about those of us who didn't grow up with complex superstitions, but still feel like we have them? For instance, I have to walk to the end of a block, pause for two minutes, then return to an entryway before I have to give a presentation or speak publicly. That sounds like a ritual, but when do these rituals become superstitions? I asked both experts what they thought and they both agreed: it's when you imbue a ritual with magical power. Dr. Vyse explains:

There is a clear psychological value to establishing a routine—coaches often tell players that if they don't have a pre-game ritual they should try to establish one simply because it focuses your mind in a mantra-like way to keep the anxiety away. That's quite rational. It becomes a superstition when it moves over to magical thinking. So when you think you have to step on the line three times before you go out onto the field or that sort of thing. It has gone beyond the ritual aspect of it and has moved on to some incantation—a magical feature.

The difference between a ritual and a superstition is in the expected outcome. If you believe that performing your morning ritual or your pre-game routine can alter the outcome then it's a superstition. If you just do it to calm yourself before taking a plunge into an important event, the ritual continues as a ritual. The interesting thing, as Dr. Vyse noted, is that while routines have a psychological benefit, so do superstitions.

Stop Being So Rational and Embrace Your Superstitions

We have a good idea as to why we believe in superstitions and it's partially to help up make sense and feel significant in a massive, confusing world. Can believing in a superstition—whether it's routines or lucky charms—really help us perform better? It turns out, yes. Hudson explains:

Superstitious rituals can give us a sense of control when we're feeling anxious or when we don't have a lot of control over a situation. This illusory feeling of control can enhance real control and boost performance in some situations.

For instance, a study (published in in the journal of Psychological Science) gave golf balls to all of its subjects. Half of them were told the golf ball was lucky. These subjects made 35 percent more successful putts. Feeling lucky gave them a better sense of self-efficacy (a belief in your own competence), which then enhanced their performance with the golf playing. The same researcher did several other experiments where she crossed fingers for them or the subjects had lucky charms on them. Their superstition helped them perform better on certain cognitive tasks, memory games, and physical tasks.

The benefits likely come from both the placebo effect and the illusion of control. When you wear a lucky pair of shorts or perform a ritualistic dance before you give a speech, you trigger different parts in your brain that make you more receptive to the changes in the world around you. Wearing those lucky shorts, for instance, gives you a confidence boost. It also makes you visualize a positive outcome. When you prime your brain with that you're more receptive to opportunities and you project positivity in a way that people respond to it. Imbuing objects and routines with a the magical power of a superstition is essentially a way to prime yourself to act a certain way. It's not magic, but it's pretty close. Photo by London Looks.

The Dangers of Superstition (and What You Can Do to Keep Your Relationship Positive)

It's not all positive. Believing deeply in the power of superstitions can have negative effects and believing in unlucky superstitions, like Friday the 13th, black cats, or the ill effects of walking under a ladder have no positive effects whatsoever. In fact, believing in bad luck can have a negative effect because it increases your anxiety for no good reason. Dr Vyse explains:

I don't see any benefit to teaching people the unlucky superstitions—the number 13, black cats, and so forth—these are superstitions that merely increase anxiety and force you into situations where if it comes along you have to think about whether or not you want to deal with it.

Any good superstition can have a downside if you become dependent on it. If on some occasion you forget to do your superstition you feel horrible. There's a delicate balance to keeping it positive.

Overdoing your positive beliefs can also have major, life-altering repercussions. Hudson explains:

It's possible to be overconfident. Stock traders might have too much confidence so they start making wild trades when they have no control over what they're doing. Or people invest a lot of money in lotteries thinking they can influence these things with rituals and luck. It's good to boost your perception of control beyond reality a little bit, but everything needs to be within reason. If you invest too much faith in these things then they can increase anxiety, like, "nothing will go right if you don't wear a certain tie." Then you lose the tie and you think, "Oh my god my life is ruined now."

Like most things in life, the key here is moderation. The fact that stock trading goes down on Friday the 13th, as does travel, financial deals, and even movie releases isn't healthy. Dr. Vyse has never had a patient call and complain about superstitions taking over their life, but he also stresses that they're best used in tandem with real preparation. For example, a lucky charm on a test is helpful provided you also studied for the test. Photo by Karin Dalziel.

The real takeaway here is that despite the fact that most people won't admit it, many of us are superstitious to some degree. Believing in these superstitions isn't a bad thing as long as you use them as a part of larger plan and integrate them into your life in a healthy way. Best of all, believing in superstitions can provide that subtle, but useful boost to your performance on all sorts of tasks.

How about you? Besides well known superstitions like knocking on wood or crossing your fingers, do you have any superstitious rituals or carry any lucky charms? And what do they "do" for you?

Title image remixed from Rido (Shutterstock), Triff (Shutterstock), and LostINtrancE (Shutterstock).

Anyone who's tried to stick to a workout routine knows what it's like to have those days when you just don't feel like it—when you feel like you haven't gotten any results from your exercise, and you wonder why you even bother. That can be depression (or laziness, depending) talking, and a surefire way to push through that fog and get your running shoes on is to focus on how you'll feel when you're finished.

Even though it seems counter-intuitive, you'll feel energized after even a short walk or workout, and the emotional benefits will make themselves known to you long before the physical ones will. Most people try to focus on inches slimmed or pounds lost—since they'll come later, consider honing in on the emotional benefits instead to hit that need for instant gratification you may have. In addition to preparing for those depressed days by remembering how good you'll feel, the folks at BodyHack suggest making a running schedule you'll want to stick to as a kind of carrot to stay motivated.

The idea itself isn't new—we've mentioned rewarding yourself immediately as a way to keep exercise interesting, and the idea is definitely sound—if the feeling of accomplishment and the endorphins aren't enough to get you up and onto the treadmill or exercise bike, maybe treating yourself to something nice when you're finished will do the trick. How do you stay motivated to work out on those down days? Share your tips in the comments below.

5 Hacks to Stick to Exercise Through Depression | BodyHack

Photo by Andrey Burmakin (Shutterstock).

Deciding to go on a diet is easy. Sticking to one is a completely different story. Countless diet books and infomercials promise slimmer waists and longer lives. More legitimately, doctors and news articles deliver (sometimes conflicting) suggestions for you: decrease your portions, drink more water, eat more greens, and so on. Too often, none of it works. Why? Because we make ourselves miserable trying to change our diets in a way that's supposed to be good for us but makes us unhappy. We took the issue to our nutritionists to figure out how we can make those healthy changes without hating every meal. Here's what they said.

We sat down with our friends, nutritionists, and registered dietitians Alannah DiBona and Andy Bellatti, whom many of you will remember from our food myths posts and asked them how, those of us who want to embrace healthier eating can do so without driving ourselves insane. For example, it's frequently said that a portion of meat in a meal should be no larger than a deck of cards. If you're used to eating a huge cut of meat, or two chicken breasts in a sitting, eating that on Monday and a deck of cards-sized portion on Tuesday is just going to make you frustrated. So how do you get from here to there? Here are some tips.

Start Slow and Make Gradual Changes

The first thing to remember if you're trying to reform your relationship with food is that it's not going to happen overnight. You have to make gradual, positive changes in your diet that eventually turn into habits that come naturally. Most of us are unlikely to commit to multiple major dietary changes overnight, and even if we stick to them for a short time, we'll eventually get so frustrated we give up and go back to our old ways. Photo by William Warby.

Portion control, for example, is one of the hardest things to adjust. We're used to being overfed at restaurants that offer heaping plates of food, and often cook too much at home too. When you get that heaping plate, make a mental note to eat half of it at the restaurant and box up the other half for lunch tomorrow—or even ask for the box before you start eating so you're not tempted to eat it all.

Still, scaling back is tough, so Andy suggests eating foods that give you the most belly-filling bang for your caloric buck. "A cup of blueberries clocks in at roughly 85 calories. A cup of Haagen Dazs ice cream? Approximately 600 calories. If you're looking for a snack around the 200-calorie mark, this matters (you could have 1 cup of blueberries AND 25 almonds or 1/3 of a cup of ice cream — guess which one will leave you feeling more satisfied!) Eating tiny portions of highly caloric items in an effort to ‘control portions' is a recipe for disaster. Your eyes will see the tiny amounts and go, ‘That's it?' — and you'll be hungry a half an hour later. Similarly, dipping vegetables (instead of chips and crackers) into peanut butter/hummus/guacamole is a much better idea than dipping crackers into a pea-sized amount of those dips. Not only are vegetables lower in calories, they also offer much more nutrition."

Focus On What You Get, Not What You're Giving Up

One way to do this, according to Andy, is to think in terms of inclusion instead of exclusion. Essentially, instead of focusing on foods you shouldn't eat, focus on the foods that you enjoy eating and fit well into your new, healthy regime. "Rather than make a goal of ‘no more mashed potatoes at dinner,' think ‘I'll add dark leafy green vegetables to my plate three times this week.' The idea is to ‘crowd out' less healthy foods, rather than attempt an overnight change," he explained. I can vouch for this—I remember watching an interview with Alton Brown where he emphasized the same point: the only way he was able to commit to his dietary changes was to think about all of the great foods he could eat tons of instead sitting around missing the things he had to cut from his diet. If you're going to make positive changes, find some healthy foods that you enjoy, and fall in love with them—include them in your meals as you like, and make them your new best friends. Photo by Natalie Maynor.

SImilarly, don't force yourself to eat something you hate "just because it's healthy." Alannah says only choose foods that you love: "If I had a nickel for every time a client said to me, ‘I hate egg whites, but they're really good for you,' I wouldn't be worrying about this lottery business. Most of us are not born adoring every vegetable, craving flax, or mainlining salmon. If you try to force an undesirable food into your diet, you're simply going to end up grumpy and underfed (chances are always excellent that you'll opt not to eat the offending item, or at the very least, eat less of it.)" If you catch yourself eating something you hate just because you think it's good for you, stop. Too often we associate healthy eating with plain, boring, dull, tasteless eating, and it doesn't have to be that way.

Experiment, Innovate, and "Eat Weird"

If you're going to get past the mental block that healthy food is boring food, the first thing you'll have to learn to do is experiment with your diet. We mentioned that one of the best ways to commit to positive changes is to fall in love with healthy options—now it's time to find some new loves. Andy suggests you enlist the help of the experts: "When it comes to eating healthier foods, you NEED recipes from the pros," he explains. "One of the biggest mistakes people make is adding foods like broccoli, brussels sprouts, lentils, and quinoa to their diets in ways that are bland and tasteless." Andy also explained that foods people consider "boring" are often because they're being poorly prepared. If you hate oatmeal, for example, stop cooking it in water and adding raisins and calling it breakfast. He suggests a tablespoon of coconut milk, a little vanilla extract, and some cinnamon to spice it up. Stir in a tablespoon of peanut or almond butter when it's finished. Sound good? It's also good for you. Photo by Julie Magro.

He suggests picking up cookbooks and recipes for vegetarians and vegans—even if you're omnivorous—because they often include interesting and tasty new ways to prepare foods you may not discover on your own. Many of them will also lead you to experiment with new spices, fresh and dried herbs, and dressings you would never have tried before. Talk to your friends, check out some of your favorite recipe sites, plug in the names of ingredients that you want to eat more of, and marvel at the myriad of delicious ways to prepare and serve it. You're sure to find some options that work for your palate, pantry, and aptitude in the kitchen.

As you experiment, remember that your relationship with food is a personal one. If you enjoy something that's a little weird, embrace it. "Just because most people don't often combine raw pineapple and seared tuna as a snack doesn't mean that you shouldn't pack it for lunch with reckless abandon," Alannah explains. "If it looks good to you, appeals to your personal tastes and is a known entity in terms of nutrition - go for it. Variety and unusual new flavor combinations are going to help keep you engaged in your new habits, and rearranging familiar flavors is a simple hack." She's right—experimentation with flavors and combining healthy options in new ways is part of falling in love with food all over again, and if you can fall in love with something that's really good for you, delicious, and fun to eat at the same time? Well then, you've already won.

Hack Your Brain with Healthy Substitutions and Snacks

Cravings and mid-day hunger pangs are the worst, and have led to many a diet derailment. They don't have to. Your willpower is limited, so stop spending it fighting cravings or resisting the urge to eat in between meals. If you want a snack, both Andy and Alannah suggest you have one—just make it something that's good and good for you. Photo by John Loo.

"Waiting until you're hungry to decide what you'll be eating is often the kiss of death for someone trying to reform his or her habits," Alannah noted. "Always, always, always carry at least one snack, if not two! Single serving baggies of nuts, pieces of fruit, jerky, and sliced vegetables can help you bridge the gap between breakfast and lunch, or address an attack of "mouth boredom" that might ordinarily send you running for the vending machine." Andy agrees: "Listen to your body. Trying to ignore hunger until the next meal usually leads to disasters (overeating, picking whatever is most convenient rather than what is healthiest, etc)." Andy suggests stocking a spare desk drawer at your cubicle so you don't even have to get up. Already-popped popcorn (so you can dig right in!), dark chocolate (80% cocoa or hither, please!), and plain instant oatmeal are some of his additions to your office pantry shopping list.

Battling cravings? Forethought is key. Andy points out that the best way to deal with cravings is to find good alternatives that are both tasty and satisfying. Really want a peanut butter cup? Andy has a better version: "Take 2 squares of the dark chocolate we just mentioned and put 2 teaspoons of natural (as in, no added sugars or oils) peanut or almond butter in between them. The dark chocolate provides minerals, antioxidants, and fiber, while the natural nut butter adds vitamins and heart-healthy fats." What about when you want a creamy, savory addition to your sandwich? "Forget nasty fat-free mayo. Instead, mash some avocado with lemon juice and a sprinkle of salt, and smear that on the bread." If you must have your craving though, try to use it as an ingredient instead of the main dish, Andy says. If you're craving tortilla chips, don't just tear into the bag, he says. Instead, have a veggie chili or some guac and put the chips on the side. Want chocolate? Shred some and put it on top of your oatmeal.

Get Cooking!

One of the easiest ways to eat healthy without making yourself miserable is to take a more active role in your relationship with food. Don't let your meals turn into things that just happen to you every day at specified times. You don't need to start living to eat as opposed to eating to live, but use those times when you're full of energy to prepare for when you're not. An hour on the weekend when you're rested and relaxed can be used to prepare a crock pot full of a healthy, hearty chili that will feed when you don't even want to think about lunch because you're so busy at work, or after a long hard day when dinner is the last thing you want to fuss over. Photo by K.I.T..

Alannah offers up a technique that's been instrumental to me personally: Find a recipe every week that interests you, and make enough of it to last a while. You'll stir up an interest in cooking (no pun intended) and you'll have lunches or quick dinners over the course of the week. "Basic cooking is going to be necessary in order to feed yourself well and sustainably, but make it a goal to find one recipe each Saturday or Sunday that looks especially intriguing to you. Shop accordingly and make multiple servings that can be easily packed and heated over the course of the week."

Speaking of crock pots, "I'm a firm believer in the power of the crockpot - this month, I've made large batches of turkey chili, bison and cauliflower mash, and chicken coconut curry stew. I've been alternating these lunches in frozen, single servings - the end result is a very satisfied nutritionist and a fuller wallet as I'm no longer running across the street each day for a $8 sandwich or salad." If you need more inspiration, Andy suggests splurging on some quality ingredients in your kitchen to help you fall in love with the healthy meals you're making, like good quality olive oil for your salads and dressings, or even vanilla bean powder instead of extract for a fancy yogurt or oatmeal topping that'll keep you coming back to a healthy dish.

Keep Your Eyes On Your Goals

Finally, the most important thing to remember is to stay committed and stay motivated. If you've followed along to this point, you've read a number of ways to fall in love not just with healthy food, but with food in general. Don't be afraid to explore new, healthy options, and accept the challenge of working in your favorite bad for you foods into dishes that are better for you, and substituting good, satisfying foods and flavors that are good to be addicted to in the place of the bad stuff. Photo by John O'Nolan.

Take it slow, and be mindful as you progress. Andy suggests you keep your eyes on one goal at a time, "Reducing your sugar intake is challenging enough without adding on the pressure of eating a dark leafy green vegetable every night with dinner, replacing refined grains with whole ones, and eating less fried food." He proposes you make a list of a few goals, commit to one for a few weeks, and when you have a handle on it and have made it a habit, then move to the next one. Unless you're the type who just needs to throw up your hands and reboot everything, you're much less likely to feel overwhelmed and give up if you tackle them one at a time, instead of trying to make sweeping changes to your lifestyle in one weekend. Alannah agrees, and says you should keep your goals front and center. "Whether it's to be a more active parent or partner, lose weight, improve your sleep or take control of your health, keep a visual reminder of your goals at all times. A photo in your wallet, or a magazine clipping on your fridge or desk of your powerful motivator will help you to remember what choice you're making whenever you face temptation. When you can see the fruits of your labor, it's easier to be strong when you'd otherwise cave in." We couldn't agree more.

Alannah Dibona, MA, MS, is a Boston-based nutritionist and wellness counselor, and the woman behind mindbodysportconsulting.com.

Both graciously volunteered their expertise for this story, and we thank them.

TItle photo remixed from Yuri Arcurs(Shutterstock).