Is it good or bad to eat the same food everyday?

 

Eating the same thing every day or repeating meals and ingredients throughout the week may help you lose weight or stick with your diet. Research has shown that more dietary variety is associated with fat and increased body weight.

The pros

Keep calories in check

Calorie counting can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to lose weight, but it can also feel more like rocket science than simple arithmetic.

Consistently eating the same meal or a few different dishes can help you easily track your calories. Count it once and be done with it. No more looking up how many calories that one tablespoon of cooking oil added to each serving.

Establish healthy eating habits

Want to eat better, but don’t know where to start? Eating the same meal or snack each day can help you create healthy eating habits without the stress of figuring out what to eat.

Plus, the more often you eat something, the more it becomes a habit instead of a conscious choice. That apple a day gets much easier to keep up after a couple of weeks!

Meal planning and prep is a breeze

From what goes into your cart to making the recipe, frequently eating the same thing cuts down on the time it takes to plan out meals. It can also make it easy for you to prep and cook.

Is your lunch always the same? You can make a week’s worth of meals on Sunday and be done with it. You’re also more likely to stick to healthier meals when the hard work is done instead of trying to pick something up or cook at the end of a busy day.

Lose weight

Eating the same thing every day or repeating meals and ingredients throughout the week may help you lose weight or stick with your diet.

Research has shown that more dietary variety is associated with fat and increased body weight. This is especially true when people are given an assortment of snack foods instead of just one. We can’t help but have a little bit — or a lot — of everything. Researchers believe that different tastes and textures may encourage overeating. When the study’s participants were only given a single snack option, they tended to eat less of it.

That doesn’t mean that diversity will automatically add inches to your waist. A variety of fruits and vegetables is absolutely vital to support your body and improve your health. But eating the same thing every day can help cut out the overwhelming amount of unhealthy or less-than-stellar snack or meal options.

Cons

Boredom

It goes without saying that repeating meals can be a real snoozeville. Just ask anyone who grew up eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch every day in elementary school.

You should look forward to what you’re eating! That doesn’t mean takeout and massive slices of pizza all the time, but you should still enjoy the food on your plate. You’ll never stick to a diet — or even healthier meals — if you hate it.

Nutritional deficiencies

There’s a reason pediatricians get nervous when your child will only eat chicken nuggets and macaroni and cheese for every meal.

Your body needs a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, proteins, and whole grains to ensure that you’re getting the macronutrients and vitamins you need. Depending on what you’re eating, you can become nutritionally deficient by severely limiting yourself to a few meals or a handful of foods.

Stalled weight loss

Adding in new, healthy foods can be a great way to make restrictive diets more interesting. One studyTrusted Source found that increasing the variety of healthy foods may help overweight or obese adults lose weight and fat. The key here is healthy foods. Eating many different unhealthy foods like baked goods, salty snacks, and simple carbohydrates is associated with body fatTrusted Source.

Miss out on health benefits

Rainbow-colored food is definitely good for you, especially if you’re indulging in all kinds of red, orange, yellow, green, purple, and white fruits and vegetables. Sticking with the same meal(s) every day can leave out a lot of foods that are loaded with important health benefits.

Lose out on good bacteria and gut health

Eating a wide assortment of foods and rotating what you eat helps increase the diversity of healthy bacteria in the gut. This good bacteria is important not just for overall health, but also for weight loss.