The Power of Simple: Why the Easy Button Is the Secret to Your Diet Success

Walk down any grocery aisle, scroll through social media, or flip through a fitness magazine and you’ll be hit with the same message: eating well is complicated. Keto, paleo, intermittent fasting, carnivore, vegan, low-carb, carb cycling—the list never ends. Each diet has its rules, restrictions, and rituals, and all of them promise the same thing: results.

If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, build muscle, or just eat healthier, you already know the nutrition world is incredibly confusing and there are so many conflicting ideas on what the “right” way to eat is. And unfortunately each promises to be the answer, so we never know what actually works.

Inside our Fit Mother Program, we’ve helped thousands of busy moms over age 40 break free from the “complicated diet trap.” We teach women how to press the easy button following a simple nutrition system that fits your busy life.

How To Simplify Your Diet 

In this article, I’ll show you not only why over complicating your nutrition is holding you back from continued progress, but I’ll share some proven strategies that will allow you to dial in your eating while minimizing the time and effort needed to eat a high quality diet.

• Always know what you’ll be eating for your next meal. Waiting until you’re starving is almost always a bad idea and will often lead to poor choices. This requires a little planning and preparing, but can mean the difference between struggle and success.
• Choose 4-5 easy, healthy meals that you can rotate each week. This helps you avoid getting overwhelmed with too many choices or rushing around shopping for ingredients.
• Stick with the basics for each meal; protein, vegetables, and a fiber rich starch. Keep it as simple as possible!
• Use intermittent fasting to help you control total calorie intake. This is especially important if your primary goal is fat loss. Find an eating window that works for your schedule and lifestyle and it becomes much easier. There are so many benefits of fasting, but one main one is that you’re eating less by default because you’re in a shortened eating window.
• Keep a pantry full of spices and seasonings. These are calorie free and can add enough variety to your meals to keep things interesting without constantly having to find new recipes. For example, marinate your chicken in tarragon and garlic one night and the next use paprika, cumin, and coriander.

Complexity Is the Enemy of Consistency

If you look closely at the people who actually succeed with their diets—year after year, not just for a month—you’ll find something surprising: they keep it simple.

Take a moment to think about how much energy goes into a complicated diet. You’re weighing every gram of food, meal-prepping a dozen containers, tracking every calorie, reading labels like a scientist, and avoiding entire categories of foods.

For a few weeks, it feels exciting—you’re in control, the rules give structure, and the novelty keeps you motivated. But then life happens. Work deadlines pile up. Your kid gets sick. You travel for the weekend. Suddenly, all those rigid rules and restrictions crumble.

Why? Because complicated diets are fragile. They only work when life is perfect. And life is never perfect.

Simplicity, on the other hand, is resilient.

Adopt The Long-Game Mindset: 30-Days vs 30-Years

Anyone can follow a diet for 30 days. But the real question is: Can you eat this way for 30 years?

That’s the difference between flashy diets and a simple, sustainable approach. Flashy diets burn hot, then fizzle. Simplicity might not be exciting, but it’s repeatable. And repeatable habits are the only ones that stick.

At the end of the day, your body doesn’t care about fancy rules. It cares about consistent patterns. Eat real food. Control portions. Repeat.

You’re a busy parent. 

If you’re anything like me, you have far more things to do than you have time and the last thing you want to do is spend hours planning, shopping, prepping, cooking, and cleaning each week all in the name of eating healthier. Does that work, yes. Can we do it for a little while with success, absolutely. But the reality is that most of us just don’t have the time, money or energy to stick with these things for any length of time.

Simplicity Builds Consistency, and Consistency Matters Most

The most powerful factor in any fitness journey isn’t intensity, whether it’s with your workouts or diet—it’s consistency. And the best way to get consistent is to make it as easy as humanly possible to succeed. And that may mean rotating your favorite 5-6 healthy meals over the course of each week. That may mean starting a meal prep habit.

It may mean getting your family on board with healthy eating habits because we all know how difficult (and time consuming) it is to make separate meals for yourself and the rest of your family!

One thing that has worked very well for me personally over the years is eating the same breakfast almost every day. I make 3-4 scrambled eggs with fresh salsa, blueberries, and some potatoes cooked in a pan with a little olive oil and spices. It’s simple and healthy and takes all the guesswork out of eating when I wake up. And as an added bonus, my daughters eat this too!

Simplicity Eliminates Decision Fatigue

Every day, you make thousands of small decisions—what to wear, how to commute, when to answer emails. By the time you get to dinner, your willpower is already drained.

A complicated diet adds more decisions: Can I eat this food? How many grams of carbs do I have left? Is this snack “clean” enough? That mental clutter often leads to burnout.

But when your diet is simple—protein + vegetables + carbs, repeated in different ways—you don’t have to think so hard. Fewer choices = fewer chances to quit. Using the Perfect Plate approach simplifies eating and makes it so much easier to follow the basic guidelines of a high-quality diet.

The Perfect Plate approach makes things super simple and is the template I have been using for my meals over the last few years. One of my absolute favorite easy meals is 6-8 oz. of meatloaf (cooked with veggies in it for extra nutrition), a spinach salad with an oil based dressing, and a handful of red potatoes cooked in the air fryer with some garlic and pepper.

Another favorite is a 6-8 oz. chicken breast marinated in an oil based dressing, asparagus with olive oil and parmesan cheese in the air fryer, and half of a sweet potato. Nothing fancy, just easy, quick, and healthy.

Simplicity Frees You from Food Obsession

One of the hidden costs of complicated diets is that they make you think about food all the time. When you’re constantly counting, measuring, or restricting, food takes up too much mental space.

Simple eating flips the script. Instead of obsessing, you start automating. You eat in patterns, not puzzles. And once eating well feels automatic, you can shift your focus to actually living your life.

A study from Cornell's Food and Brand Lab found that the average person makes about 200 food-related decisions every day, many of them unconsciously. These decisions range from what to have for breakfast to whether to get a snack. Think of all the freed up mental space you’d have if you didn’t have to constantly have to be thinking about and planning your next meal. Do you think you’d be more productive in other areas of your life? I do!

Simple Doesn’t Mean Boring

One fear people have is that “simple” equals bland. Not true. Think of tacos: meat, veggies, tortillas. Or a stir-fry: protein, rice, vegetables, sauce. Simple meals can be endlessly creative without needing dozens of ingredients or restrictive rules.

One of the most popular recipes we’ve shared inside our Fit Mother Program is a dish called Crack Slaw. It’s so easy to make, tastes amazing, and is loaded with nutritional value. It’s just one of the many recipes and tips we share inside our private group to help make fitness easier for you.

Article Summary: The Bottom Line

Nutrition isn’t supposed to feel like a second job. It’s supposed to be your easy, nourishing structure that gives you the energy to support you for the rest of your life.

The most successful eaters aren’t the ones chasing the latest diet trend—they’re the ones who found a way to keep it simple. Because simple is sustainable. Simple is repeatable. And in the long game of health, simple is one of the real “secrets” to success.

A few more ideas to help you succeed:

• Always have healthy snacks on hand. This can prevent you from stopping at a fast food restaurant when you’re out and starving.
• Buy in bulk and freeze for later. Meats and vegetables work very well.
• Focus on eating single ingredient foods and use spices and marinades for experimentation with different flavors.
• Consider joining the thousands of women who are already using these strategies and many more to stay fit and healthy through our Foundations Program.

Ready to press the easy button on your diet?

That’s what we do every day inside the Fit Mother Program. Our proven 6-week program gives you the simple meal system, workouts, and accountability to finally get results that last just like the members below!

*Please know that weight loss results and health changes/improvements vary individually; you may not achieve similar results. Always consult with your doctor before making health decisions. This is not medical advice – simply very well-researched information on building muscle, nutrition, and sustainable fitness habits.