How The Meal Delivery Trend Has Helped Many With Maintaining A Healthy Diet

Convenience may be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the advantages of signing up for a meal delivery service. And this element is certainly key to the trend – pre-portioned ingredients and easy-to-follow instructions make up each meal kit and negates the need for the daily decision on what to eat and the subsequent after-work dash to the shop to get the supplies needed for it.

But there’s another significant plus to having meals delivered – whether in the form of a pre-made meal that simply needs reheating or a meal kit to put together yourself at home – which has driven the current trend in this market: their capacity to help consumers maintain a healthy diet. We investigate below just how meal delivery services can help you stay in shape.

Portion Control

One of the significant factors in a meal delivery service’s promotion of healthier eating is its pre-portioned aspect. For example, whether you choose ready-made meals or a meal kit, the portions will be pre-set and nutritionally balanced, making it simple to control your intake of calories, saturated fat, and sugar, for example, and meaning that the temptation to snack on leftovers that can be the result of cooking too great a quantity can be avoided.

Clean Eating

For those proponents of a ‘clean’ eating regime, there are a number of providers who supply a range of meals specifically catering to this lifestyle requirement. Clean eating, generally speaking, prioritizes eating plenty of fruit and vegetables and cutting out, as far as possible, any food that has been processed. The focus is on eating ‘whole’ foods, and gluten, refined carbs, and sugar are avoided. Incorporating plenty of fruit and veg can make this diet great for general health, particularly in terms of immune system support and cardiovascular and digestive health. Diets high in fruit and veg and low in processed food are particularly good for bowel health: read more here to learn about gut health, how to support it, and the story your poop has to tell you about your overall health. Find out, too, what to eat to regain your digestive balance and get things moving in the right direction(!).

Low-Calorie Choices

By signing up for a meal delivery service, you’re much less likely to get in from work and phone to order a calorie-laden, oversized portion of fish and chips or a family serving of Chinese take-out for just the two of you.

Some services offer tailor-made ranges of low-calorie meals or meal kits, which make for an easy way to maintain a healthy diet by saving you the hassle of figuring out the healthiest choices and portion sizes every evening. Alternatively, some providers offer their users the option to customize their meals: as well as being a means to avoid a particular ingredient you don’t like; this can also be a handy way to replace ingredients to lower the fat and calorie content of a meal: swap a component portion of bacon for a serving of mushrooms, for example, or switch out a serving of beef for a portion of white fish. This is a good way to customize meals for those on, for example, a low salt diet or for those who may need to monitor their sugar intake due to diabetes.

Eating Widely

Eating widely is increasingly being seen as an important part of eating well, and this directly feeds into the current meal delivery trend. It is the simplest thing in the world, especially with our busy lives, to get stuck in a rut with the food we prepare and eat. It’s easy to fall into the habit of eating the same seven evening meals or so on rotation and to have similar things for breakfast and lunch day in and day out. The result of this can be that we are not eating an extensive range of food and are missing out on all the nutrients that could be available to us by broadening our culinary outlook.

This is where a meal delivery service comes in; by offering a range of pre-cooked meals and meal kit options, we are more likely to try things that maybe we wouldn’t consider otherwise – maybe because we wouldn’t feel confident cooking a certain dish, or because we simply didn’t know how to best incorporate an ingredient into a meal. Every different kind of food we eat diversifies the amount of good flora in our gut, making wide eating vital to attain and maintain good health.

Delivering Better Health

Through portion control and the availability of tailored low-calorie and low-fat options, a meal delivery service can play a crucial role in helping you eat healthily, especially for those with busy lives who, understandably, may struggle to resist the temptation of a quick, unhealthy fix or find the time to shop for and prepare a diversity of dishes. It can also be a great choice for those who, for mobility reasons, may find it difficult to make a journey to the shops or to stand for long periods preparing food.

Meal delivery, ultimately, can help us to make better choices when it comes to the food we eat and to stick to these choices.