With the new year recently begun, many have made new year’s resolutions to be healthier and lose weight. Although this popular resolution fails more often than succeeds, there are ways to reach one’s goal.

Diets are one of the most frequent ways to change one’s body and health. Going completely “cold turkey,” counting calories or going completely vegetarian often proves discouraging after a while because most dieters want results immediately.

One substitution that can be made is with bread. By switching wheat bread for white bread, the additional fiber helps lover blood pressure and regulate bowel movements while the magnesium helps build strong bones.

Wheat bread is also a complex carbohydrate which breaks down glucose more slowly, allowing the body to retain energy longer and not crash from glucose spikes.

Another easy substitution is milk. Buying non-fat or one percent milk is healthier than whole milk. It has the same health benefits that whole milk has but lacks the amount of fat in whole milk. This simple substitution can be done with yogurt, sour cream and other dairy products as well.

Ideally, one should eliminate fried foods and butter from one’s diet, but realistically, it is one of the hardest diet choices to maintain. One way to get one’s fried fix is to fry at home with vegetable or olive oil instead of lard or butter. Substituting oil for butter in every dish is a simple way to satisfy that indulgent need for decadence.

Chips are among one of the most popular and unhealthy snacks people choose to eat. By substituting fruits or vegetables such as carrot sticks or grapes for the chips, the satisfaction of eating a mid-day snack is still there, but with fewer calories and fat.

At first, food substitutions can seem hard to implement, but they can become routine and a part of a regular healthy lifestyle.