“Eating well”.
If you grew up in America and want to move into the realm of “eating well”, or eating better, or eating “healthy”, you are at some point going to have to confront and overcome the cultural dogma you were indoctrinated into. The purpose here being to provide you with a clean slate from which to get started learning how to “eat well”.

Cultural dogma #1 = Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The cultural dogma of “3 square meals a day”, each with a designated time frame. Ya gotta lose this.

Cultural dogma #2 = Each meal has to be comprised of a balanced consumption of food items from a set of identified food groups. Ya gotta let this go too.

Cultural dogma #3 = Food item X is a “breakfast” food, not to be consumed outside the designated time frame. Food item Z is a dinner food, not to be consumed outside the designated time frame.

Cultural dogma #4 = all snack foods, desert foods, and psuedo-meal foods are the same…..They’re all “junk foods”.

Reality…..food items such as organic thin crust “supreme” pizzas are among –the– most nutrient dense food items known to man.
Reality…..food items such as organic apple pie, organic cheese cake contain extraordinarily high levels of cell–necessary poly and mono unsaturated fatty acids, essential for brain function, immune cell function, and for production and repair of cell membranes throughout the human body.

In the quest to “eat well” its necessary to put data ahead of dogma.

Avoiding so-called “junk foods” that are packed with nutrients won’t help you eat well. Avoiding some foods in the evening because they’re “breakfast foods” won’t help you eat well. Avoiding some foods in the morning because they’re “dinner foods” won’t help you eat well.
To “eat well” you’re gonna have to remove the artificial, culturally indoctrinated time of day designations from food items.

Not all fats are the same.
Eating “a low fat diet” is more likely to prevent you from consuming required levels of essential fats than it is to help you with weight loss or maintaining weight loss…..and more likely to contribute to long term health problems that will begin showing up in no uncertain terms in your 50’s and 60’s.

The word “calorie” has no place in human nutrition.
Your cells don’t care about how many calories you consume.
They don’t care about what percentage of the food you consume is comprised of fat, protein, or carbohydrate.
They care about grams, milligrams, micro-grams, nano-grams of nutrients.
And they don’t do averages…..X calories per day. They do absolutes.
The cells of your body need what they need when they need it.
Today’s needs are not tomorrow’s or last week’s.
Learn to think and reason in these terms.

Once you’ve deleted the dogma, creating a standardized nutrient dense written food plan that repeats every few days may prove to be the easiest approach to truly getting started “eating well”, eating better, eating “healthy”.