September 10, 2026

What Does Healthy Eating Actually Look Like?

I follow a food creator who makes genuinely great macro-friendly recipes. Recently she posted a pudding-style dessert made with Greek yogurt, reduced-fat Cool Whip, and crushed Biscoff cookies. Someone in the comments asked, essentially, how this could be considered healthy when it includes ingredients like that.

I get variations of this question myself, constantly. Someone sees me eating pizza, or mixing mayo into my tuna, and says, "Wait, aren't you not supposed to eat that?"

I don't think people asking this are wrong to wonder. Most of us were taught, informally, that healthy eating is a list: foods that are "allowed," and foods that aren't. Kale, good. Cookies, bad. Once an ingredient shows up that feels like it belongs on the "bad" list, the whole meal gets disqualified in people's heads, no matter what else is going on.

I think that definition is wrong, and I want to walk through why, because the actual answer changes how you eat far more usefully than any list of banned foods ever could.

It starts with a number, not a list

Here's the part that surprises people most: your body doesn't know or care whether a calorie came from a "clean" source or a "junk" one. What it responds to is the total energy coming in versus what's going out.

That's not just a theory I like. A large randomized trial followed 811 overweight adults assigned to different diets, some higher in fat, some higher in carbs, some higher in protein, for two full years. At the end, weight loss was essentially the same across all of them. The specific ratio of macros didn't determine the outcome. The calorie deficit did.

So if the goal is weight loss, calories are the foundation everything else sits on top of, not the ingredient list. That's the first piece of the real definition: healthy eating starts with understanding your energy needs, not with sorting foods into good and bad piles.

Once calories are set, the real question becomes: can you actually stick to the number?

This is where most "list" based approaches quietly fall apart. Knowing your calorie target is easy. Living inside it without feeling constantly deprived is the actual challenge, and this is where food choice starts to matter again, just not in the way most people think.

Compare 300 grams of potatoes to 300 grams of cooked pasta. The potatoes cost you meaningfully fewer calories for the same weight of food, which means more actual food on your plate for the same calorie budget. That's the practical difference between a lot of whole foods and a lot of processed ones (and by processed here, I mean foods that come out of a container with a long list of combined ingredients): whole foods tend to be lower in calorie density and higher in volume, so you can eat more, physically, for the same number of calories.

That has a real psychological effect on top of the physical one. I think about it a little like haggling at a flea market. A vendor lists something at $10, you negotiate him down to $8, and you walk away feeling like you won, even though he was probably happy to sell it at $8 the whole time and priced it at $10 specifically to give you room to feel that win. Food works similarly. When a meal gives you more volume than its calorie "price" suggests, you feel satisfied. When it doesn't, you feel shorted, even if the calorie count was identical to something else.

This is the actual tool for staying in your numbers without misery: lean on higher-volume, lower-density foods to do most of the heavy lifting, so your calorie budget stretches further and you stay full longer.

So does that mean processed food is the enemy? Not quite.

Given everything above, you'd expect me to say cut it out completely. I don't think that's right, and here's why.

There is real research showing associations between higher ultra-processed food consumption and a range of negative health outcomes. A recent review looking across dozens of studies found consistent associations, though it's worth noting plainly that most of this evidence is observational, and the strength of the association varies quite a bit depending on the specific outcome being studied.

That's a good reason to generally lean toward whole, higher-volume foods when you have the choice, for the exact reasons in the last section. It's not a good reason to treat any food containing sugar or saturated fat as forbidden. Even the government's own dietary guidance has historically acknowledged this. The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans explicitly noted that a nutrient-dense eating pattern can still have room for added sugars and saturated fat, including using small amounts of them specifically to make nutritious food more palatable. (A newer 2025-2030 edition is now the current guidance, and while the framing pushes harder on whole foods and processed food reduction, the core idea that flexibility exists within a calorie budget hasn't disappeared.)

In other words: processed foods are a tool you use less often because they make hitting your numbers comfortably harder, not a category of food you're morally forbidden from touching.

And here's what happens when you get that distinction wrong

This might be the most important part of this whole post, because it's the part that actually explains why the "banned foods list" approach doesn't just feel restrictive, it tends to backfire.

There's a meaningful body of research comparing "rigid" food control (all-or-nothing, certain foods are completely off-limits) to "flexible" control (working within a budget, no food is fully banned). One study following more than 54,000 people found that rigid control was associated with more disinhibited eating (eating without self-control) and more frequent, more severe binge eating episodes. Flexible control was associated with the opposite: less disinhibition, lower BMI, fewer binges, and a higher likelihood of successfully losing weight and keeping it off.

Treating pizza, or a Biscoff cookie, as forbidden doesn't just feel unpleasant in the moment. It's associated with worse outcomes than treating that same food as something that fits occasionally, inside your numbers.

So, what is healthy eating?

Not a list of allowed and forbidden foods. It's understanding your energy needs first, leaning on higher-volume, less-processed foods to make that number easier to live inside, and leaving deliberate room for the stuff that doesn't fit that mold, because pretending it doesn't exist tends to backfire.

That's why a Biscoff-and-Greek-yogurt dessert isn't automatically "unhealthy" for including a cookie. And it's why my pizza or my mayo-loaded tuna isn't a violation of some rule I'm supposed to be following. The ingredient list was never the actual test. The pattern is. Understand your energy needs first (you can use our free TDEE resource), then prioritize whole foods, and find ways to make room for the nice treats.

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About the author

Connor Blackmon is the owner of Heroes Fitness, a private personal training gym in Valrico, FL. He built it for the people who feel weird about gyms — the ones who've thought about canceling their membership before they even used it once. No mirrors full of strangers, no guessing what machine does what, just a private space and a coach who actually explains things instead of just barking reps. His goal is simple: help men and women get stronger without the anxiety that usually comes with it.