What most are wanting to do is stay on trend, turn back the calender and decide to eat as natural as possible. Many are now reviewing the benefits of altering not only their diet, but to simplify their lifestyle as well. This is what’s known as the clean eating movement.
It begins with cutting out foods which are manufactured, processed, has multiple ingredients, and deciding on foods which are more direct from the source. What deciding to eat clean does is it changes not only what you eat, but the way that you eat it.
What it does is encourages altering your diet so you’ll eat more fresh raw produce and whole grains which are loaded with nutrients, along with other healthy foods which contains the good fats to improve overall health.
This lifestyle change can only provide healthy benefits, and more importantly can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, major illness, and most other medical issues.
It begins with knowing the path your food takes before reaching your dinner table. An effort is made to cut out as many fillers, additives, preservatives, and other unneeded products as possible.
Eat Several Small Meals A Day
What’s involved when following this lifestyle, is eating 5 to 6 nutrient packed lighter meals a day, this instead of the traditional 3 big heavy meals.
The benefits of eating more often improves the metabolism because of the extra work that it needs to digest the food more frequently, while it also maintains your blood sugar levels.
What it also prevents is overeating since you won’t feel like you’re starving until the next meal, which causes you to indulge. Doing so also provides a steady stream of nourishment to the body, keeping you satiated and energized throughout the day.
What some think however is that eating smaller meals won’t make them full, so it comes down to eating the proper foods, while giving your body the time to adjust to the new food regiment.
One way is to eat foods which contain fiber, such as fresh vegetables, as most of them when eaten raw contains the right type of fiber which keeps you feeling full longer.
Buy Eat Local
One simple rule of clean eating is purchasing local fresh foods. Buy local because what doing so does is it reduces processing, packaging, and you know that it’s as fresh as possible.
Although buying local is healthier and better for the environment and the local economy, at times, it can also be more expensive than what’s massively available at the mega grocery store chains.
What most find is that it’s worth it, as the reward of buying all their produce from the local farmers market, guarantees that all its nutrients are intact.
Eat “Whole” Grain Foods
It’s the whole grains which are good for you, while if the label says “processed” grain foods, they’ll most likely have the nutrients stripped out of them, making them void.
So when it comes to grains for clean eating, you need to ensure that the grain packaging says “whole,” such as whole wheat flour. If you don’t bother looking and assume that it’s a whole grain product, most often it’s just empty wheat.
There are now also other whole grain products which are becoming mainstream, such as rye, buckwheat, quinoa, and brown rice, which gives you more of a variety of whole grains in your diet.
These healthy alternatives all use whole grains for different types of baking and cooking. Most health practitioners claim that consuming whole grains are linked to decreasing the risk of cardiovascular diseases, along with other medical conditions.
Eat Raw Fresh Produce
Those who are familiar with clean eating knows that the key ingredients are local fresh produce, preferably raw and organic, as this is the biggest part of the movement.
Although everything’s not eaten raw to eat clean, there are extended benefits when doing so. Eating raw means that the produce is guaranteed to be in their most purest nutritional state, and the key reason why raw is preferred.
What raw means is that none of their valuable nutrients are lost from either frying, steaming, or boiling them out. When it comes to the skin of the vegetables, what they also contain are copious amounts of valuable nutrients.
So if the skin is edible and you can tolerate its taste, then leave it on. It also saves you from throwing out this part of the edible vegetable, which is an important component for those who eat clean.
Although the freezing process when it comes to fruits and vegetables have come a long way to preserving its nutrients, they’re not really considered clean eating.
The reason being there may be potential hidden additives added which displaces the nutrients, as well as there being far too many steps to process and package the frozen vegetables.
Direct From Farm To Table
What most are now conscious of is what they eat, where it’s coming from, what’s in it, how it’s prepared, the packaging, its environmental impact, and how much processing it took to get to their plate.
The trendy restaurants are aware of this when serving to their clean eating diners. The idea being that the chefs buy their food directly from the source, cutting out the middle-men and the processing, this by serving the food direct from the farmer to your table.
What these establishments do is support the local growers, while encouraging clean eating, this by offering their patrons meals which are raw, fresh, natural, and nutritious.
If you’re wanting to realign on eating clean yourself, then you can begin by following these protocols in your own kitchen, this by following the farm to table trend, this by buying local or growing your own vegetables.