Managing healthy eating: Definitions, classifications, and strategies

This study sought to enhance understanding of how people conceptualize and manage healthy eating. An interpretivist approach employed the constant com parative method to analyze 79 open-ended interviews with individuals about food choices and eating behaviors forhealth-related themes. Participant rep orts depicted cognitive systems for defining healthy eating, where personal meanings evolved through ongoing exposure to a variety of experiential and informational sources. Participants' definitions of healthy eating cluster ed around seven themes for relating food and eating to their personal healt h. Healthy eating definitions shaped how participants categorized food and eating situations as healthy and unhealthy. Participants described healthy eating strategies that were differentially associated with various healthy earing themes. These findings provide an emic perspective of how a diverse sample of adults conceptualize and manage healthy eating. Exposing the impl icit and multiplistic nature of healthy eating conceptions provides informa tion useful to health educators promoting behavior changes.