There is a new way of eating that is fast gaining popularity and for once it is not another “diet”. It is called ‘clean eating’ and the good news is when you eat this way you can improve your health, lose weight, increase energy levels and protect yourself from disease. There is no health or fitness goal that you can achieve without first cleaning up your diet and this can be one of the biggest challenges when one is faced with improving one’s health.
Clean eating is the opposite of the typical modern Western diet filled with heavily refined and processed foods. This typically means lots of man-made unhealthy sugars and fats, additives, preservatives, colors, flavorings, and any one of the 14,000 chemicals approved for use in food production. This is not what the human body is meant to have and that is reflected in the fact that two thirds of us are overweight to one degree or another and many of us have multiple health issues.
Sure, it is convenient to open a packet, can, frozen meal, or a container of food that we don’t have to prepare and cook ourselves but this convenience comes at a very high price on our health. People are becoming more aware of the damage being inflicted on their health from eating these types of foods and are looking for better ways to feed themselves and their families. Clean eating is perfect for doing just that.
What exactly is clean eating?
In a nutshell, clean eating is the practice of eating whole, foods such as fruits, vegetables, lean proteins, nuts and seeds as close to their natural state as possible. This means choosing food items like an apple, a piece of grass fed beef, a bunch of spinach, a sweet potato, an orange, fish from the ocean, a handful of nuts and so on.
It also means getting your butt back into the kitchen and cooking from scratch the way our parents and grandparents did. Clean eating is the only way to avoid the chemicals that are destroying our health and giving our body’s the nutrient dense food that it has evolved on through their centuries.
When you are eating clean it means you stay away from the normal junk that makes up our standard diet. Anything that comes in a pretty box or packet with little to no nutrients whatsoever is eliminated or certainly cut right back. An easy way to remember if a food is clean is: “if man made it, don’t eat it.”
Clean eating is great for losing weight
Clean eating can increase the efficiency of our metabolism (our bodies engine) increasing the rate we burn fuel (calories) every single minute of the day and night, both when we are active and when we are resting. Natural whole foods have lots of fibre making you feel fuller for longer helping you to eat less calories overall. One of the reasons many people first look at adopting clean eating is to lose a few (or a lot of) pounds. Without the all those sugars, and fats your body will give up its excess fat stores.
In addition to losing some body fat, some of the first things people will notice when clean eating is an increase in energy and healthier looking skin and hair. Taking out all the additives, preservatives and chemicals from the diet and filling your body with the nutrients it wants and needs, will help increase your energy and vitality as well as lead to a healthier appearance.
Another aspect of eating clean is to eat small frequent meals. Our standard diet of three square meals a day is outdated. It was great when we worked hard manually but now most of us spend hours sitting each day and expend little energy. Eating smaller meals more frequently helps the body in a number of ways. It helps us to have a feeling of being satisfied over feeling “starved at meal time, and thus running the risk of overeating.
If you are someone used to eating highly processed foods on a regular basis breaking away from that can mean perseverance as your body has likely become addicted to the chemical additives and man-made ingredients that are in them. Just start adding in some clean foods to your diet and once you make eating clean a habit, it becomes part of your life.
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