Tiffany Shelton - Eating Clean: Clean-Eating Cookbook for Beginners and Busy Families

The clean eating diet plan isnt really a diet at all. Instead, it is an alteration in the way you think about your food. Instead of eliminating one type of food from your dietlike carbohydrates or fatsyou work to better understand the route your food took from its origin to its final place in your body, helping you to both lose weight and create lasting energy.

Essentially, clean eating allows you to eat whole foods, unprocessed foods, and foods that have not been altered on their way to your refrigerator or freezer. Through the clean eating mindset, you learn to refuse refined and processed foods. However, because our current society handles food on such a complex level these days, eating clean can be an incredibly challenging nutritional approach.

Whole foods grow in the garden, roam freely on farms, or swim in the sea. Think about the food chain you learned about during your science classes. Single-celled animals, plants, and plankton are at the bottom. Small fish and other tiny animals eat the single-celled animals, and bigger animals eat the small fish and other tiny animals, and so on up the chain. People (and sharks) are at the top, so everything eaten by the creatures lower on the chain becomes part of the creatures at the top.

To understand all the health benefits of eating clean, you need to consider another food chain: the processed food chain. A plain apple, a handful of chickpeas, or an organic egg are at the bottom. As you move further up the chain, manufacturers manipulate the food until it becomes more artificial ingredients than real food. The foods at the top of this chain include traditional snack foods, fast food, and foods packed with additives, preservatives, and artificial flavors.

Manufacturers end up stripping processed foods of many of their nutrients either to make them easier to combine with other ingredients or to change their characteristics. In contrast, whole foods come to you just as nature intendedbursting with flavor, color, texture, and nutrients.

The foods that are part of the eating clean plan are at the bottom of the processed food chain. They dont have labels, they dont carry preparation instructions, and they certainly dont have ingredient lists. These are the foods to buy each time you go to the supermarket

What Does Processed Food Look Like?

In order to understand how to initiate the clean eating diet plan, it is essential to know your enemy. Stay away from processed foods:

1. Processed foods have additions of all kinds. They have added fat, salt, sugar, or preservatives. Note that these preservatives work to keep the food fresher for longer. However, you do not want to put those additives in your body.
2. Processed foods have been altered from their traditional state. Look, for example, at whole grains without their initial germ or bran. This created refined bread, which is quite popular on the market, even though it is relatively void of nutrients.
3. Processed foods have lab-manufactured ingredients. Generally, youll find these ingredients with many syllables. These ingredients are most often difficult to pronounce.

Processed foods are everywherefrom a Pop Tart to a more healthful packet of oatmeal. They are generally void of nutrients, and they are doing nothing for your waistline.