Essential kitchen rules will help you to make healthy eating decisions and support your overall health and fitness goals. While most people may dream of getting their diet on track, it does take action to transform your health and lifestyle.

Of course, things are rarely quite so simple. Dietary changes can prove surprisingly difficult to put into effect. In a world of chocolates, wine, processed gourmet microwave meals, and all kinds of other culinary temptations, bad essential kitchen rules are designed to lure us off the straight and narrow path.

Of course, there are things you can do to streamline this process and help give yourself the best possible chance of sticking to your guns.

One of the best ways of ensuring that you don’t waver from your diet is to ensure that your kitchen is arranged, set up, and stocked in the right manner — whether that means having a knife sharpener on standby, or keeping your cutting surfaces spotlessly clean for an impromptu cooking session.

Here are some essential kitchen rules to arrange and organise your kitchen for the sake of supporting your healthy eating mission.

Kitchen Rules: Throw out all junk and processed food

It’s been suggested by psychological researchers that willpower and self-discipline are, essentially, expendable resources rather than things we have an unlimited supply of.

A 1996 study by Roy Baumeister found that test subjects who were made to turn down a plate of cookies in favour of radishes, performed more poorly, and put in less effort, in on a puzzle-solving test than test subjects who were allowed to eat the cookies.

The point is, the more you have to exert self-discipline and willpower during the course of the day, the thinner it will run.

Therefore, if your kitchen is crammed full of temptations, you may well be setting yourself up for a willpower failure sooner or later.

Throw out all the junk and processed food you have in your kitchen. Everything. Start with a clean slate.

Kitchen Rules: Keep some prepared healthy snacks in the fridge at all times

You’re going to crave snacks now and then, but in a household without sugary biscuits, chocolates, and whatever else you may have indulged in before, things can get rough.

Instead of forcing yourself to forgo all snacks altogether, keep some healthy snacks in the fridge at all times.

This could be as simple as some celery sticks and homemade spread, some healthy, homemade flapjacks, or even just some hard-boiled eggs.

The key is that there’s always something healthy available when you feel the urge to graze.

Kitchen Rules: Keep a good store of containers at hand, and cook in bulk

If you’re new to home-cooking all your meals, you might well get deeply fed up, in a hurry, if you have to do it multiple times each day.

To prevent yourself falling into the trap of losing your patience immediately, try cooking in bulk and storing your meals in containers.

This way you could prepare all your dinners for a whole week — or at least a couple of days — in one go, reducing the temptation just to order takeaway.