Ask HN: What's your secret diet tip you can share?

Even if you usually do vegetables properly, keep some bags of frozen precut veg around for when you are tired. You can often drop it in the pan of whatever meat you're cooking, or into a stew or soup. Keeps you having veg even when you are behind.

Macro hacks: Oats, oats, oats. Carbs and protein in a pinch. Flavour them however or don't. I don't.

Final word: fitness and health are the same thing. You can't be truly healthy and vital with diet alone. The mind needs movement, your body needs it. You don't need to be a bodybuilder, just get moving whichever way is fun for you. I do strength training and cycling.

One especially powerful secret is "decide in advance".

You will have some eating plan in place... then there will come a day when the food available does not match your eating plans, or some social/cultural event, or when you simply have a bad day and "fall off" your eating plan.

The secret is to anticipate/expect these things to happen. Decide now, when you can be dispassionate, where you can compromise, for how much, and how you will get back on track afterward.

Will you eat cake at the birthday? How much? You fall off the plan. How will you coach yourself back onto it? etc.

Waiting until the heat of the moment is how a small misstep (I planned to have one small handful of [whatever], and I just realized I've eaten half the bag) turns into a disaster (screw it! I already broke my diet. [insert bad self-talk and self destructive behavior here]. I'll just finish the damn bag)

Advance planning is how a small misstep is acknowledged (oh crap, I ate half the bag), then recovered (ok. I ate too much. What's done is done. I can't change that but I CAN stop the damage here so it doesn't get even worse.)

So fill up on fatty meat, not fries and pasta.

Salt salt salt! It's not health advice, but just season to taste, and slightly over if you are preparing meals at home, not out of a can. In fact, forget the canned food.

Meat grinder, large cuts of beef, free scrap fat from butcher. Boil large cut and fat for 1 minute to kill surface bacteria. Grind. Cook medium rare. It's a real nice and satisfying meal. Forget cooking to 165.