Sometimes, the healthy food motivation pictures you see on Pinterest seem… unachievable. I’m here to show you just how easy it actually is.
Do not be fooled into thinking that healthy food is hard to make. And really do not be fooled into thinking that eating healthy is expensive.
I don’t know about you, but I used to scroll through Pinterest when I first started my health journey, I would these beautifully presented meals and I would think that there was no way on earth that I could achieve that.
And if beautifully presented plates are what it took to eat healthily, then forget it. I would never get there.
But let me tell you this. It really isn’t that hard.
Actually, most of the time it’s just about pretty coloured foods being put together that did most of the work. (Along with nice plates, good lighting and a clean background of course.)
So here I’ve compiled some of those pictures that seem too beautifully hard for you to recreate… and showing you how easy it really is to recreate them.
Here’s to some true healthy food motivation 🥂
6 HEALTHY FOOD MOTIVATION PICTURES
1. Whatever you have in your fridge can be turned into an aesthetic bowl
Starting strong with any type of bowl. These always look so good in pictures… so full of food and colours. To me, they always looked labour-intensive. So yeah, they are an excellent healthy food motivation but I never actually got around to actually making them.
Little did I know… these bowls probably take about 10 minutes to make.
The corn and the beans are canned… so that takes about 30 seconds. The cheddar cheese was bought as is shown in the picture so maybe another 30 seconds for that.
The Pico de Gallo might be store-bought. If not, maybe add 2 minutes to chop some tomatoes. and onions. Then there’s a 1/4 avocado chopped into slices.
The most and only “time-intensive” thing here is cooking the ground beef and the rice. And even that doesn’t take time or require any chef skills.
And what’s really great about bowls like this is that you could replace any ingredient with any other ingredient. Literally just anything you have in your fridge or pantry, you can throw together and make a bowl.
Need more convincing? Below are other examples of bowls that require little time to make. Love this type of healthy food motivation 
2. A smoothie bowl is just a smoothie in a bowl - you just need frozen fruits
I promise you that these pretty smoothie bowls are not as fancy as they seem to be. Don’t get me wrong, they can be really yummy but all the aesthetic that you see in the pictures comes from the pretty toppings.
Let me start by explaining the actual smoothie portion of this picture. I don’t know exactly what went into this particular recipe, but definitely some green ingredients like spinach. Typically these bowls also have mango and banana in them. All of these ingredients are blended out with a little bit of water or milk.
The only trick here is to make sure the fruits or whatever you’re using are frozen.
And then for toppings? Whatever you have. Normally, you see these topped with some berries (raspberry, blueberries…), nuts (almonds, walnuts, cashews…), seeds (chia, hemp…) and some granola.
Honestly, these things looking pretty are all about the topping layout. If it weren’t for that, then this is just a smoothie in a bowl.
The only hard part about this is then cleaning the blender. 
I promised healthy food motivation, not easy cleaning motivation…
Speaking of blenders, there are two that I like to use. If I’m making bowls for 3+ people, I use this Ninja Blender– which you can buy in Costco as well (I did). Or, if I’m making for myself only, I use this Bullet Blender. So much easier to clean…
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3. Energy balls are just uncooked oatmeal with some nut butter mixed in
Do not waste your money on 20$ energy balls at the supermarket.
You probably have what you need to make these at home. Honestly, if you’re feeling like a baked good without the actual waiting time of baking, then these are good.
There are 3 main ingredients to energy balls: Oatmeal, some type of ingredient binder like almond butter (or any other nut butter) and a sweetener, typically maple syrup.
Any other flavour you want to add on is up to you. It comes down to what you have in your pantry.
In this particular example, it’s chocolate chip energy balls. I’ll let you guess what they added to make them chocolate chip flavoured.
Other than chocolate chip, just think about whatever you’d bake into your cookies or muffins. Whatever comes to mind is what you can mix into energy balls.
- Coconut flakes
- Dried fruits
- Nuts
- Different chocolate chip flavours
- Lemon zest / orange zest.
4. Stir fry: just add soy sauce or hoisin sauce or whatever Asian-looking sauce you have
Ok I KNOW that any of my readers who have any aptitude for Asian gastronomy is going to get mad at me here. Unfortunately, we cannot all be good at cooking one of the world’s best foods (in my opinion). So bear with me.
I’m just trying to help others like me do their best. 
I don’t know about you but whenever I look for an Asian-inspired recipe, I notice that I need a list of about 395 Asian sauces are veggies that I can only find in Chinatown. And I don’t know about you, but most of us have probably bought those ingredients for a single recipe and then never used them again Well it’s time to pull those back out.
Here is the super dumb-down version of stir fry.
- Optional: Start by adding some ginger and/or garlic to a hot pan
- Chop veggie you think would taste good in an asian recipe and add to the pan
- Mix in whatever Asian sauce you have
- Add the protein (chicken, beef, shrimp, tofu, go nuts)
- Add some sesame and/or green onions seeds for pazaz
- You’re done
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5. One sheet pan meals - literally 3 ingredient dinners
I cannot stress enough how much one sheet pan meals got me through college.
There only one recipe you need for this:
- One protein: any fish, any meat, any poultry, any plant based alternative
- One veggie (or a combination): asparagus, broccoli, peppers, carrots, zucchini, green beans, bok choi, whichever veggie you have
- One “heavy” carb: potato, sweet potato, spaghetti squash, any pumpkin…
- Something to give it flavour: olive oil, any spice, lemon, soy sauce… the possibilities are endless
And that’s it. That’s all there is to this picture. There might be some parmesan cheese on the asparagus I think, maybe some cilantro on the potatoes but those are just details.
Honestly, you don’t even need healthy food motivation for this. It’s the ultimate lazy meal.
(Find more of these lazy hacks on this article of helpful nutrition tips for college students!)
6. Breakfast toast... is just toast.
How many times have you seen a picture like the one above? So pretty, so colourful, so full of flavours. Yet you’ve never made them because…. well I don’t know why. I never made them either when I first saw them.
Don’t make it any bigger in your head than it has to be. It’s just toast.
- Start with a base spread, whether it’s sweet (nut butter, greek yogurt, honey)
- Add a fruit or veggie (avocado, berries, tomatoes, cucumbers)
- Add a protein (egg, salmon, greek yogurt again)
Now I bet that eating those ingredients without toast would have been just fine. But bread makes everything taste better. Makes you feel like 
that girl, all put together. So why the hell not?
Hopefully, you’ve started to see how Pinterest’s pretty pictures are nothing more than nicely placed food on a plate. Of course, certain meals are harder to recreate, chefs are chefs for a reason.
But for all us common folk, sometimes it’s just useful to have someone show you how to look beyond the nice lighting and truly see what it takes to make yourself the same meal.
xx LS
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