Sure, you know you need to start eating healthy food more often but time constraints, responsibilities and maybe even a lack of awareness keep you from changing your eating habits. But now's the time to start; and it might not be as difficult as you thought it'd be to get going on a healthy diet. Even making one or two healthy meals per week can really pay off.

Whether your nutrition goals include reducing fat, getting more nutrients into each day, eating more fibre or all of the above, the following 10 recipes for a healthy diet will help you on your journey.

1. Kamut Pancakes
An old relative of wheat (kamut grains have been excavated from ancient Egyptian tombs), kamut has huge grains two or three times the size of wheat. The hearty flavour of whole kamut makes it particularly suitable for pancakes. By beating egg whites and adding them to pancake batter, you add protein, reduce the amount of baking powder needed and avoid the extra fat from yolks.

2. Buttermilk Or Keffir Pear Smoothie
This pear smoothie is delicious. Buttermilk is low-fat (generally 1%) and nutritious, and so is keffir, a Russian-style fermented milk product (available at large grocery and health food stores).

3. Spiced Zucchini Muffins
If you often grab a muffin at a bakery, you'll save hundreds of calories by choosing these light snacks.

4. Summer Green Salad
Like olive oil, avocado oil is a healthy alternative. It also features excellent viscosity, which means you can use less oil than you normally would. But feel free to experiment with other richly flavoured oils, such as walnut, hazelnut or pumpkin seed, for this multitextured salad, upping the amount to 3 tbsp (45 mL).

5. Fresh Quinoa Veggie Salad
The light texture of quinoa makes this high-protein ancient New World grain quite appropriate in salads. Use South American light-coloured quinoa or the nutty brown quinoa harvested from Saskatchewan.