Perhaps you have been wondering what all the talk about clean eating is really all about. What is clean eating and what is not clean eating? Do I need to give up my favorite foods to live a clean eating lifestyle? And why are there so many food plans being touted right now?
We know it can be a lot to take in but the Paleo diet, the ketosis diet, and the gluten-free diet can all be part of a clean eating lifestyle. The basic idea of a clean eating program is to stop using processed foods as much as possible. That means giving up most canned foods, bottled foods and any other foods that have gone through a processing procedure to the point that they are no longer in their natural state.
A clean eating diet also attempts to reduce the sugar content in foods. While some recipes require a sweetener during the cooking process, refined sugar is replaced with a natural sweetener such as honey or pure maple syrup.
When you start working clean foods into your diet you want to start slowly. There are many small changes that you can make that will add up to a major change after a few weeks. For example, if you are using artificial creamers in your coffee and you don’t want to change to drinking it black, you will need to change and use a real milk product from cattle are raised on a chemical free farm. You will also want to change from the refined, processed white sugar to something like natural stevia.
Another easy adjustment is to rid yourself of candy and use fresh fruit when you want something sweet. Bananas, mangos and ripe peaches are all loaded with natural sugars. It does take a little adjustment of the mind to convince us that they should replace candy. However, with a little bit of research, we soon find out that all that sugar in those candy bars is not to make the candy sweeter but to get us addicted to eating foods loaded with processed white sugar. Once the sugar addiction gets started it is very hard to break it. Sugar is hidden in plain sight on the labels of many canned goods. It goes by many different names and often you will find corn syrup (a sugar) listed right next to “brown sugar” on a label. It is not unheard of to find three or four kinds of sugar in a processed food. Manufacturers know that once you are addicted they usually have you as a customer for life.
Those are but two small items that bring a big change from eating processed foods to eating clean healthy foods the way nature offered them to us. If you make a couple of small changes each week, within a couple of months you will be eating a clean eating diet and feeling much better about your health. The New Normal is Clean Eating so join the movement and make a couple of small changes this week.
