Eating clean
This weekend, I was visiting my family. Which meant that I was eating white pasta, full-fat cheese, bagels, pizza and summer bbq stuff (and the list could go on and on). It was delicious! But not without feeling it: since I normally don’t eat that stuff, my body actually felt different, and not in a good way. I felt tired and I even gained a couple of pounds. Now that I’m back in town, I’ve been eating ‘cleaner’ and exercising (and feeling normal again). Which lead me to write about eating clean.
I’m a big fan of this style of eating because it’s not a fad diet, so you can just make it a part of your life. According to Answer Fitness, the Clean Eating philosophy is really based on the natural health food movement of the 1960s, which then got transformed into the “whole foods” approach to eating, which emphasizes consuming foods (preferably organic) that are unprocessed or refined as little as possible before consumption.
Here are the basics of clean eating. If you follow this philosophy of eating and exercise regularly, you’ll definitely see a difference in the way you look and feel.
- Eat a wide-variety of whole, unrefined and unprocessed foods in a form that’s as close as possible to how the foods appear in nature
- Avoid processed sugars, especially sugary beverages like soda
- Avoid saturated fat and trans fats, and instead substitute healthy, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats
- Always combine complex carbohydrates with lean protein and some healthy fats at every meal
- Spread your food out over 5-6 smaller meals, consumed every 2-3 hours
- Eat for maximum nutrient density. In other words, avoid “empty” calories found in fast food, soda, snacks, cakes and cookies, and substitute in nutrient-dense snacks.
- Pay attention to proper portions and practice portion control
- Drink lots of water (at least 8 cups a day.)
By the way, it’s okay to splurge every now and then to stay sane!
Here’s the link to the full article that explains each of those points in greater detail:
http://www.answerfitness.com/204/clean-eating-eating-clean-answer-fitness/
Tags: eat clean diet, healthy diet, healthy food recipes
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 27th, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Health. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
