With indulgent autumn and winter cuisine starting to show up on restaurant menus, party buffets, and dinner tables this time of year, it’s easy to let good eating habits slip. The chilly days make us long for comfort food, and holiday parties provide endless excuses for breaking healthy eating goals. Added to that, our increasingly busy schedules leave us feeling too flustered to worry about eating well. But healthy eating doesn’t have to be difficult or time consuming. Nor does it require a diet overhaul. Instead, start small by trying out these fast, easy diet fixes. Master them one at a time and you’ll be well on your way to a healthier diet by the start of 2010. Start with Small Substitutions  When it comes to cutting calories, there are the obvious, big-picture fixes, such as swapping a morning doughnut for a bowl of fiber-rich cereal. But don’t forget about the benefit of tweaking your eating habits on a smaller scale. Shaving a few calories from your breakfast, a few from a midday meal, and a few more from dinner can help whittle your waistline as well. Even better, these small changes won’t leave you feeling deprived. Try trading a traditional bagel-and-cream-cheese breakfast for a toasted English muffin spread with whipped cream cheese. Or beat an afternoon slump with a nonfat latte instead of your daily Frappuccino. Over time, you won’t even notice these calorie-saving swaps and your new self will be healthier for it. Don’t Make Any Food Off-Limits We should be able to enjoy what we eat, so cutting candy or whole food groups from our diets makes for boring dining. So enjoy those so-called forbidden foods—say, an occasional scoop of ice cream or dense artisan bread—but aim for an overall balance as well.  Try following a method we’ll call the Pick Your Poison approach. This means if you start your day with a hearty brunch, you will consciously eat lighter meals the rest of the day to compensate for your AM indulgence.

Likewise, if you can’t live without the chocolate lava cake at your favorite restaurant, order a light appetizer and salad for dinner instead of fettuccine alfredo. It’s all about balance. Create a Colorful Plate Eating a rainbow of foods keeps you from falling into a diet rut. Add some bright colors (think bits of produce, not a bowl of Skittles) to every meal to incorporate fruit and vegetables into your diet. These colorful additions are healthy picks and infinitely more appealing than bland brown and white foods. Just think how much prettier a bright beet, arugula, and feta salad is than a neutral bowl of mashed potatoes. Watch Your Portion Sizes Restaurant portion sizes have ballooned in recent years, such that we’re all ingesting far more food than we need to eat to feel satisfied. And the problem carries over into the home, where we heap impressive amounts of food onto our plates.  Decrease those portions a bit and you’ll quickly improve your diet. Start reading the labels on packaged food to find out what a real serving is. (Hint: It’s smaller than you think.) Become more mindful by eating smaller portions of indulgent dishes like homemade macaroni and cheese and larger portions of lower-calorie foods like braised winter greens. And, learn to recognize the portion sizes that leave you feeling good and the servings that leave you feeling stuffed and guilty for eating too much. Eat When You’re Hungry  When the party season strikes, this decade’s old weight-loss mantra is a hard rule to follow. Most of us graze at buffet tables long after we’re full and spend rainy nights watching television while snacking on the couch. To discourage overeating, become familiar with what your body feels like when it’s full and find distractions—strike up a conversation with a colleague or go on a short walk—when you’re full but still feel like munching. Finally, remember that our bodies take about twenty minutes to feel full after eating. So eat slowly and savor every bite.