You can reverse a lot of the “do not” suggestions made in previous strategies to trick yourself into eating more healthy foods instead of just figuring out how to avoid bad foods.

Let’s say you, for example, want to eat more baby carrots because they are filling and healthy. What do you do?

Put the carrots into a large clear container and put this close while working. You can also put the carrots within easy reach in the refrigerator. This combines a lot of the research from the threats section to get yourself to unintentionally eat more of a healthy food. You can use the same idea with salads, vegetable plates and anything else you want people to eat more of.

I am constantly amazed at the difference this approach makes. If I hide carrots in the vegetable drawer of the refrigerator, I won’t think about them when a snack attack hits. But if they’re plain view, I’ll eat them first instead of settling for a worse choice.

We keep hard boiled eggs in our refrigerator as a filling snack. Eggs are healthy, fix sized, and have a natural stopping point to discourage overeating. A funny thing happens though. When only a few eggs are left in the bowl, we stop eating them. This is right out of the threats. When more eggs are in the bowl we eat more of them. We don’t want to believe these threats are true, but they are.

So when the egg bowl goes low, I make sure to fill it up again. If we didn’t, we’d probably switch to a less healthy snack. I’ve noticed the same situation happens with apples too.

If you want your family to eat more fruit, then have a big fruit basket displayed proudly on a kitchen counter, next to the refrigerator. Don’t have junk food in the house. It has been found that even when healthier foods are available, people will still eat the junk food if it is around. If you only have good food around then that’s all you can eat.

With a little thought and creativity, I am sure you can come up with a lot of ideas that will work for you and your family.