Why shouldn’t we eat the best food possible?
This one thought changed the way I think about eating
Food should be food.
That shouldn’t be a difficult concept to understand.
And yet we find ourselves in a world where industry is trying to make food bigger/better/faster/quicker-to-market/more-profitable … It’s not working.
I’ve had so many a-ha moments over the years …
Like my father dying at the age of 54 from a massive heart attack. I asked: Why? And it’s led me down a rabbit hole to understand our food supply better.
My mother, lying in a hospital bed shortly after a stroke, placing her order for dinner. How can they allow heart patients to order such awful food … as they’re being treated for heart disease IN THE HOSPITAL!?
Or a brother-in-law diagnosed with cancer. I brought it up gently in conversation: “Did they mention food?” Nope. Not on anyone’s radar.
Every step leads me to another moment where I scratch my head and wonder where everything went wrong.
Clean Eating … Another confusing topic
I was chatting with a woman about food when she said, “I’m on the clean eating diet.”
What!?
Keto. Paleo. Gluten-free. Non-GMO. The words are endless.
It’s hard keeping up with it all. But I realized after a bit of research, “clean eating” ranks high on my confusion list.
How do you eat clean? What is it? What does it mean?
In my attempt to figure it out, I got even more confused.
On one site, they had recipes for Biscuits and Sausage Gravy, Chili Cheese Fries, and Beef Short Ribs. What!? How is that clean?
What is clean eating?
After reading a magazine that touted clean eating, and discovering their complex recipes with lots of ingredients, I started thinking more about my concept, how I would define clean eating.
I would define it as:
Eating as close to the natural state as possible.
When you take a tomato off the vine and eat it, it’s in its natural state.
Taking that same tomato and converting it to ketchup is not clean. It’s processed.
Seems simple to me.
Yet, thumbing through this magazine made me realize just how confusing a term like “clean eating” can be.
So I went the extra mile and Googled it. The confusion continued.
There was loads of advice, all that made it feel like clean eating was a one-time thing. Something you “cleanse” with for a 7-day cycle, and then get right back to your “old” way of eating. The headlines were just as mind-boggling:
How to eat clean for a whole entire week
Clean week – get healthy in 7 days
Clean eating reset after indulging for a week
How is that possible? Shouldn’t “clean eating” be a way of life? You know, like our grandparents and great-grandparents did decades ago when they went out to the backyard and plucked veggies from the garden. Everything was simple because they knew exactly where food came from.
Clean eating - Dirty eating: What’s the difference?
I don’t know anyone who thinks of food as clean or dirty. But I have long since started thinking about food in a food/non-food way.
Food was originally an easy concept. You hunted it. You gathered it. You plucked it from trees. You found it on bushes. You dug it from the ground.
Eventually, we took matters into our own hands, and we carefully saved the seeds and planted them into a garden to better control the food source. We corralled animals into pens to make harvesting easier.
Then it all went awry. We slipped into the bigger/better/faster/quicker-to-market/more-profitable way of thinking.
Why worry about growing something if you can create it in a lab? Why ensure it’s “healthy” when all that’s really of concern is production?
That’s where it’s easy to go astray. And boy, has it led to opportunity!
Chickpeas might be great - but what if you could roast them, dip them in chocolate, puff them, or turn them into flour? Imagine the opportunity!
Of course, sometimes what you can do with food is not important. It’s about how you grow it …
The US produces corn, lots of corn. They sell it on the open market to many other parts of the world. Recently, Mexico announced they would no longer buy US corn because they would no longer allow GMO corn/glyphosate in their tortillas and dough. The US said there was no science behind that decision, so Mexico gave them the science: a 200-page document filled with scientific evidence about the problem with GMO corn and glyphosate.
How would you feel if you shopped for your favorite foods on your supermarket shelves, only to discover later that many of the foods in your basket are banned in other countries?
The United Kingdom, Japan, and other parts of Europe banned a chemical called BHT, which the US uses as a flavor enhancer in products like Wheat Thins and Frosted Flakes. Switzerland, Austria, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark banned items made with trans fats like partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oils, which we include in products like Coffee-mate and Pillsbury biscuits.
The purpose of clean eating – in my mind anyway
In this diet-crazy world, people (women) are always searching for the next-best weight-loss strategy.
I’ve never liked the concept of “diet.” In fact, I banned it from my vocabulary when I first had my daughter. (It turns out it’s tough to “ban” a word like diet from your vocabulary. But I was a first-time mom, and I gave it a go.)
Diet refers to short-term fixes. It’s filled with restrictions. It’s about accomplishing something … and, when it’s over, moving back to normal patterns.
Clean eating isn’t a weight-loss program. It’s a way of life.
Most Americans eat a diet of heavily processed foods. It’s packed with sugar, salt, fat, and synthetic ingredients that do little to enhance your health.
Clean eating cleans up your diet, removes the bad stuff, and incorporates more of the good stuff. Every day. Every week. Every month. Every year.
For life.
Yes, this can seem like a daunting task. But here’s how I like to think of it.
Clean eating is a journey, not an endpoint. It’s okay to mess it up from time to time. You make the best choices you can every single day, every single meal.
Clean eating isn’t about removing something. It’s not about replacing it with something else. Instead, it’s about creating good food. Wholesome food. Nutritious food. Food that’s good for the body and gives you what you need to thrive.
How to eat clean and how to make it gorgeous
“You eat like this every day?”
I looked at my table through the eyes of my friend.
“I may have added a few splurges here and there, but … yeah.”
Every meal doesn’t have to be an event to be decadent. Yet why wouldn’t you make it a delight when you can?
I’ll admit, it’s taken me years to get to where I am today. But the most critical part of the process was … I started. And I’ve made choices.
How do you eat clean every day? You make clean choices every day.
My sister said it well when we went grocery shopping together recently: “Don’t you shop the aisles in the center of the store?”
I laughed as we continued our journey around the perimeter.
In our quest for speed and a simpler life, we’ve made things waayyy too complicated.
See, you don’t need to take an old recipe and find ways of replacing it with cleaner, better-for-you ingredients. Stop thinking of old ways of eating. Instead, you create a meal starting with the “clean” or “plant-based” concept from the start. You create good food for the sake of good food.
Food was never meant to be a casual stop at a quick-and-go, fuel up and get on your way.
Food is meant to be enjoyed because of what it does for your buddy. It’s about nutrition. It’s about energy. To help us be the best versions of ourselves. (Of course, it can be Gorgeous too!) I like to think:
And you can start that journey today.
Make a better choice.
Plan.
Cook instead of going to a restaurant.
Choose something as close to natural as possible.
Shop from the perimeter of the store and skip the inside aisles.
Pick up a cookbook and fix dinner yourself.
You may fall in love with the results.
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