What Does Clean Eating Involve?

Eating clean means you’re focused on choosing healthy, natural foods and are paying attention to the sources of your food. Clean eating can transform your life.

Let’s first look at the principle of clean eating:

The Basic principle of clean eating is to eliminate processed foods from the diet.

In addition to being high in sugar and salt, refined foods have many chemicals, preservatives, and additives. They can have a negative impact on the body that ranges from weight gain to allergies. 

Clean eating focuses on a diet of unprocessed and healthy foods.

Instead of counting calories, your centre of attention is on finding and eating whole foods. 

Your entire diet changes after a commitment to eating clean. Your meals are more frequent and smaller during the day.

In addition, you’ll feel fuller and avoid blood sugar spikes. You’ll learn to appreciate food again with a renewed sense of love.  

Consider these tips:

1. Understand this is a lifestyle change. Clean eating is more than a diet trend that vanishes at the end of the week. It’s a lifestyle change. 

• A true commitment to clean eating requires that it become a permanent lifestyle change. This is not the type of diet that can end after one month of juicing or a couple of weeks of eating raw vegetables. 

• Without counting calories or worrying about portion sizes, you are able to adjust to the lifestyle change easier. 

2. Accept a gradual transformation of your diet. It’s not easy to eliminate every processed food from your diet, so a more gradual approach lets you slowly exchange the bag of potato chips for baked kale chips you make in your own oven. 

• It’s easier to switch to clean eating by using a slower approach. Your family members may need time to accept the loss of their favourite pretzels or burgers. 
• Cutting out junk food may be easy, but processed foods are also lurking in other parts of the kitchen and cabinets. The canned soups and lunch meats aren’t part of a clean eating plan, so you’ll have to get rid of them. 

3. Learn to pay attention to your food. Clean eating will change how you look at food and what you’re willing to accept on your dinner plate. 

• Today’s busy lifestyles can keep people from paying attention to their meals. They grab a quick breakfast or snack on junk food during the day to deal with hunger pangs. Clean eating addresses all of these issues by making you focus on each bite. 

Clean eating is not a diet trend that will fade after a few days or weeks. It is a long-term lifestyle change and commitment to eating better.

“To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice, few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain . . .” – Michael Pollan