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5 Ways to Break Out of a Food Rut and Get Excited About Your Meals Again

If you’ve been feeling meh about your menu, try these tiny, tasty tweaks.

August 22, 2024

Chicken: It’s what’s for dinner…again. Salad: It’s on the side…again. Yogurt: It’s your quick workday breakfast…again.

We’ve all been there: finding a meal or snack we like and then eating it on repeat. And there are obvious perks to a consistent menu: Having go-to foods can make grocery shopping and mealtime less stressful, especially when you’re time-crunched or too exhausted to make decisions. But if convenience is your only motivation, you might be missing out on getting a wide variety of nutrients—and some fun too.

Food serves a greater purpose than providing carbs for energy, protein for muscles, and fiber for digestion. “Food isn’t just fuel; it’s not just macro and micronutrients,” Nicole Rodriguez, RD, a New York City–based nutritionist, tells SELF. “Food is family memories; it’s our culture. If you’re not looking forward to mealtime, it can impact your mood and may also prevent you from eating in a way that makes you feel full, satisfied, and energized,” Rodriguez says.

Of course, an unvaried diet can also just be…boring, and if your reaction to your fridge is “Ugh, not that again,” you may be more likely to order in. Sometimes that’s a plus (see below), but frequently cooking at home can help you eat a wider range of foods and have a more balanced diet overall, research suggests—and it’s often cheaper.

Feel like you’re in a food rut and craving some variety? Here are five things you can do to break out of it and enjoy (no, really enjoy) your meals again.

1. Make one small tweak—or a few, if you’re up for it.

Learning a new recipe can be fun and delicious, but stepping out of your comfort zone in the kitchen doesn’t require drastic measures. “Follow the same meal template you usually do, but change up one or two things,” Rodriguez suggests. For example, if you often eat chicken, brown rice, and broccoli, maybe swap the chicken for sirloin steak, fry up a couple of eggs, or toss salmon chunks in the air-fryer. Or you could play around with the veggie portion, exchanging broccoli for sautéed spinach or roasted mini bell peppers. That brown rice? Make it wild rice, quinoa, or farro—you get the point.

You can experiment with switching up one, two, or all of the items in your trusty lunch, dinner, or breakfast (changing the type of fruit in your oatmeal or yogurt bowl is another simple upgrade). Regardless of how many modifications you make, these tweaks are “an easy way to experience different flavors and give your body different micronutrients,” Rodriguez says.

2. Give “health halos” the side-eye.

Certain foods, like spinach and kale, are famous for their nutrition benefits—and deservedly so!—but it can be difficult to look past what we’re told are the “healthiest” foods for us. “The thinking sometimes goes, Kale is good for me, so I should eat kale. But if you don’t like kale, or aren’t in the mood for it, there’s a whole family of cruciferous veggies that you could be exploring and enjoying. It’s not kale or nothing,” Rodriguez says.

“Recognizing that there’s room for different taste preferences within the realm of health can help you break out of a food rut,” she adds. To deprogram this “health halo” mindset, she recommends ditching what you “should” eat and choosing what you enjoy. If that’s peanut butter instead of almond butter, go for it. If it’s regular iceberg lettuce in a salad, more power to you. If it’s white rice, dig in: “There’s more to life than brown rice—we can have different grains,” Rodriguez says.

3. Build your own bowls.

Bowl-style meals at places like Cava, Chipotle, and Sweetgreen are especially great rut-busters because they bring a variety of textures and high-flavor ingredients (like pickled red onions, olives, and salsa) into the mix. For inspiration, Rodrigez recommends stopping by one of these fast-casual restaurants and trying out a new-to-you food, be it a protein, bean, veggie, or topping. If you discover a combination you love, you can then replicate some of the same fun flavors at home. “I like to create a bowl like this: Pick a bean, pick a leafy green, add a protein, toss in a couple more veggies, and top with something fun—like a zesty sauce or tortilla strips—and then you’re done,” she says.

Creating bowls at home is an easy way to regularly rotate your menu because you can keep the base rather consistent (like spring mix and chickpeas, for example) and then mix and match other ingredients to make what feels like a fresh meal, Rodrigez adds. Plus they’re easy to prep in advance: You can buy pre-washed greens, frozen whole grains, and bags of shredded carrots, for example. You can also rinse a can of beans or chop cucumbers ahead of time, and stock up on convenient toppings like jarred olives, sun-dried tomatoes, roasted red peppers, shredded cheese, and crumbled feta. “One of the keys to getting out of a rut is to make it as effortless as possible,” Rodriguez says.

4. Give new life to leftovers

You had chicken kabobs for dinner last night and, sitting in your fridge now, they kinda give you the ick. Totally fine. Try to turn your leftovers into something else entirely, Rodriguez suggests. For example, you can throw the chicken into tomato sauce as an easy, filling topping for pasta. You can also cook leftover meat and veggies in a frittata, scramble them with eggs for breakfast tacos, or put them between two tortillas for a tasty quesadilla.

And those chicken tenders you made in your air fryer? Consider reheating them and tossing them on a toasted frozen waffle to create the comfort food classic (you know the one). Remembering that breakfast foods don’t just have to be eaten at breakfast and dinner foods aren’t just for the evening can also help open up your options, she says.

5. Embrace “fun” foods.

“I’m very much team ‘never skip dessert if you’re craving it,’” Rodriguez says. “When you feel deprived or like you shouldn’t eat this or that, there’s a stronger chance that you may not feel in control of your eating when you do get in front of those foods.” What’s more, foods that are less nutritionally dense—gooey chocolate chip cookies, crispy fries, a big scoop of ice cream on a waffle cone—are not just added calories. “These are foods we often bond over,” she says.

Likewise, fun, feed-your-soul foods may be ones that you enjoyed from your childhood or are important parts of your culture. Getting out of a food rut can mean embracing a new view of what eating for wellness means—and recognizing that it’s also about eating foods that make you happy.