Diets are popular because everyone wants success. However, true success comes from a lifestyle change to healthy eating, not temporary restrictions and pills.
Clean eating can take on many meanings. It doesn’t necessarily mean to be on a diet, but rather to start a new lifestyle, one that has you eating more pure, natural, and raw foods and ingredients. Foods with minimal additives and preservatives are recommended, as well as staying as close to the garden, organic and local, as possible. Have you heard the term farm-to-table lately?
Organic, Local Food
Farm-to-table is a movement to bring more organic and local products to restaurants. It gives customers the opportunity to know where their fruits, vegetables, and meals in general come from, which is one step closer to not worrying about additives in your food when you go out. It can be scary not knowing where the food in the kitchen comes from, what types of cooking utensils and equipment they’re using, or even how they’re preparing your food. If you go to a place that is farm-to-fork or farm-to-table, you can be assured the food provided in your meal is from an organic retailer or distributor close by. This is a more sustainable manner of obtaining the freshest fruits and veggies, and with little to no chemicals to help them grow.
Too Much Food
In America, it is both a blessing and a curse to have so many accessible foods, as every night of the week we can have a different meal from another culture. I believe many cultures base their cuisine on a blend of metabolically stimulating and depressing dishes that combine all the nutrients necessary for the food to benefit the individuals consuming them. In countries that have a number of cultures and cuisine available to the public, we tend to see more issues with health, which could possibly be linked to the types of food the people are eating on a regular basis.
We should balance out our diets to make sure we get different types of foods and avoid constantly consuming heavy, slow types of foods from multiple cultures. That type of variability will cause a slower metabolism and can cause other problems down the road as well.
Clean Eating and Paleo
Clean eating is an awesome strategy for those who have been trying out a Paleo diet for it has a similar ideology. The Paleo diet tries to consume little to no artificial foods, processed foods, or sugar besides natural sugars (i.e. from fruits) in the daily diet, and instead focuses on ingesting wholesome and raw foods as much possible. To eat clean is similar, steering you away from fast food and encouraging you to pack your own lunch, know what you’re putting in your system, and fuel it with the correct nutrients and ingredients that will power and energize you throughout the day.
What’s Right for Your Body
Being open to trying new foods is essential, for there are more and more options being created everyday in America to cater to the needs of all individuals and their nutritional necessities. You need to figure out what is good for you, individually, not just listen to what the overall public should try to have in their life. Learn what you need in your daily life to make you healthy, happy, and strong.
Not every product is for everyone, so feel free to try different ones out and see how you feel by keeping a log of what you had and how you felt 30 minutes after. The more you notice how you feel after eating certain foods, the quicker you can eliminate them from your diet or maybe just have them in moderation. It is also good to use a cleanse for even a day before restarting your food consumption to clear your gut before exposing it to certain elements again.
How to Start
Outlets to begin your new, clean lifestyle can begin online or at local farmer markets. There are health food stores with cooking classes, as well as certain cookware stores that can teach you about safe cookware. There are so many opinions on what is bad for your body, what ingredients are healthy, or where your food is truly from, and it can be very overwhelming! Pick one thing at a time to focus on in your diet to break it down and slowly change your habits and move into good, quality eating, where you gain the most out of everything you ingest.
Overall, to get your body to an optimally functioning state, you’ll need to reset it: a juice cleanse, a juice cleanse with raw foods, activated charcoal, or any one of many other cleanses. I recommend a juice cleanse, as it allows your digestive system to relax and have a break. You should also make sure to gradually ease back into eating solid foods after the cleanse. This is the best time to reintroduce your system to pure, raw, organic foods, and to also have some kombucha and yogurts to get good bacteria in your gut. Once you’ve cleared your body of most impurities, you can continue by eating fresh, clean, and unprocessed foods in every meal.
