When it comes to healthy eating facts, there’s lots of information out there that can be really confusing. And more importantly, a lot of it is sadly just plain wrong. Here I’m sharing 3 key ideas about healthy eating and healthy weight loss that you may not know — and that can help you finally start to get the results you’ve always wanted!

1. It isn’t necessarily dangerous to follow a low-calorie diet. There’s so much hype about how harmful it can be to try to lose weight by reducing calories. Now, granted I’m not a medical professional, but I’ve completed a LOT of reading on nutrition and haven’t seen anything anywhere that suggests any major risk for reducing calories — with the caveat that the foods you do eat, the calories you do eat are very nutrient-dense, which is the way I recommend you eat anyhow!

You see, nutrient density is a concept developed by Dr. Joel Fuhrman about how many micronutrients there are in a calorie of a particular food. So super nutritious foods like berries and dark, leafy greens are very rich in nutrients and low in calories, so we can say they are nutrient-dense. How this applies to what you eat is that when you eat lots of nutrient-dense foods, your body is getting better nutrition than it ever has in your life, most likely (I kid you not, this stuff works!). So you can get by with eating fewer calories and still feel fine and actually get healthy as you go.

But if you stick to lots of less healthy foods, then yes, you do run a risk of more serious malnutrition if you cut back on calories because the foods in question (particularly highly processed foods high in refined sugars, flours and fat sources like shortening) are so devoid of nutrition on a good day that cutting back is just that much worse for you. And that’s a reason why eating the junk also prompts your body to eat more, which leads in turn to more weight gain — because you’re basically starving your body of nutrients while eating too many calories — a lousy combination if you want to be thin and healthy.

Keep in mind that no matter what you eat, if you get in more calories than your body needs, you will gain weight no matter what. So you *have* to reduce calories to lose body fat. Why not reduce calories in a way that nourishes your body so that you not only lose weight, but also feel fabulous and get healthier as you go. Plus, the healthy stuff tastes great too, even if you’re not used to it just yet.

Which brings me to the second of these 3 healthy eating facts:

2. Healthy food tastes delicious! Did I say delicious? I mean absolutely wonderful! If you’re on the fence about healthy eating, you may think that it sounds like drudgery, like it might take away all your pleasure from eating. The simple truth is that the more healthfully you eat, the more you will enjoy healthier fare. It is incredible how effortlessly it tends to happen, in fact.

For example, I came to healthy eating as a junk-food vegetarian who lived on potatoes, bread, pasta and cream sauce, and yet within a very short while I had lost my taste for most of those foods and had grown to really love much healthier foods. I recommend to clients all the time that they consider practicing healthy eating because it gets easier every time, and before they know it, they’re discovering how easy it really is to change their tastes to better-for-them foods.

3. Losing weight doesn’t have to be hard. When you eat healthfully following the way of eating I recommend, you typically automatically lose weight quickly and easily. Granted, some of our bodies — especially as women — are more resistant to weight loss than others, but fundamentally, nourishing your body with healthful foods with lower calories than our bodies need to maintain a higher weight (because we’re overweight when we start this new way of eating!) is the easiest way to lose weight I’ve ever come across, despite the learning curve initially as you get used to the new lifestyle.

I imagine that if you’re coming to this blog for the first time and are just getting interested in healthy eating, you may have been shocked at what I’ve just shared. But the reality is that healthy weight loss is easier to achieve than you likely think. And a quick look at the Recommended Resources here on my site will get you pointed in the right direction right away — particularly the nutrition references, which share healthy eating facts that are scientifically substantiated and can improve your health immensely. And since truly healthy foods also help you lose weight healthfully, healthy eating is a no brainer — especially if you’re a busy mom with little time on your hands who needs to do the bare minimum to get healthy and thin.