How to Eat Clean For Beginners – Complete Clean Eating Food List
As a beginner, once you learn to eat clean, you will have mastered 80% of your healthy lifestyle or weight loss journey because we are what we eat!
However, before you begin, it’s important to note that clean eating is not a fad diet in this context.
What you’ll find in this article is that eating clean isn’t just something you start to lose a few pounds to fit into that new fancy dress.
The choice to eat healthier should be based on the desire to look and feel better in the long term rather than just for the present moment.
How to Eat Clean For Beginners
This clean eating guide and food list emphasize that you don’t need to eliminate any food group, like fats or carbohydrates, to lose weight.
This information will help you understand the importance of maintaining a balanced diet and how to select healthier options for carbs, fats, and proteins.
Drink water
Although often neglected, drinking sufficient water daily is where clean eating truly begins.
Water aids the body in functioning properly, including aiding in food digestion and suppressing appetite.
You will be working against your own efforts if you manage to get all your other foods right but wash down your meals or satisfy your thirst with sweetened drinks.
The daily recommendation is approximately 11 cups of water for women and about 15 cups for men. To ease the transition from sugary drinks to water, consider adding pieces of fruit like strawberries or lemon, or herbs like mint to your water.
Plan your meals
Clean eating starts with holding yourself accountable for every decision you make. If you eat junk, you will ultimately look like junk.
Planning your meals helps you maintain control over your diet. By planning, you’ll know what to have for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks.
As you plan what you will eat for each meal, you will also put a lot of thought into your portions.
This is especially important for people who have trouble controlling their food intake or deal with mindless eating.
Meal planning also lets you control your portions before hunger kicks in. You will only eat what you have allocated for that particular meal.
Some people plan their meals daily or for three to five days in advance. You can choose the number of days to plan and prepare your meals based on your schedule. To get started, create a meal plan that includes recipes—write a shopping list based on the ingredients, go shopping, and prep your meals.
Cook your own meals
Cooking your meals is the only way to know what exactly is in your food. It might be tempting to buy ready-made food that claims to be healthy, but don’t do it!
Most healthy ready-made foods available today resemble real food, but upon closely examining the food label, you’ll be surprised at the number of additives included to enhance their appeal and flavor.
Buy your ingredients and cook your food at home.
Avoid alcohol
You’ve heard it before: ‘A glass of wine a day keeps the doctor away.’ This saying might sound appealing if you love wine, but according to the World Health Organization, any amount of alcohol can impact your health.
Alcohol is classified as a level 1 carcinogen (same group as radiation, tobacco, and asbestos) and is the cause of at least 7 types of cancer.
A news release by the World Health Organization revealed that there is no safe level of alcohol use.
The report based on the European region revealed that alcohol-attributable cancers are caused by light and moderate alcohol consumption (less than 1.5 liters of wine or less than 3.5 liters of beer or less than 450 milliliters of spirits per week).
Don’t drink your calories
The number one mistake people make when eating clean is replacing solid foods with smoothies.
Not all smoothies are healthy. In particular, fruit juices are high in sugar and calories.
The body processes liquid calories differently from those found in whole foods.
Liquid calories are absorbed faster than those from semi-processed and unprocessed foods.
Consider this: a person who has eaten 350 calories of oatmeal (a complex carbohydrate) for breakfast will feel more satisfied than someone who has consumed the same calorie amount from a morning smoothie (a simple carbohydrate).
Simple carbs are quickly used as fuel for the body, leading to sudden spikes in blood sugar.
On your clean eating journey, it’s essential to avoid sugary drinks, especially fruit smoothies, as studies show a direct connection between high consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages and type 2 diabetes.
Avoid simple carbs
Although they offer a quick boost of energy, simple carbohydrates are often considered empty calories since they provide minimal nutritional value.
Simple carbohydrates are digested much faster, which can cause spikes in blood sugar and can be harmful to the body’s regulation of insulin.
Simple carbs include white bread, white rice, soda, pasta, table sugar, instant oats, candy, most breakfast cereals with added sugar, and confectionery products like cakes, ice cream, and chocolates.
While simple carbs are referred to as bad carbs, complex carbs are the good carbs that should always be part of a clean eating diet.
During digestion, complex carbohydrates are broken down slowly, helping to steady blood sugar levels as glucose is gradually released into the bloodstream.
A diet rich in complex carbs will help you stay feeling full longer.
Examples of complex carbs that will keep you feeling full longer include:
- Pinto beans
- Peas
- Brown rice
- Kidney beans
- Black beans
- Old fashioned oats
- Whole-wheat pasta
- chickpeas
- Quinoa
- Kale
- Sorghum
- Broccoli
- Whole grain bread
- Soya beans
- Sweet potatoes
- Lentils
- Carrots
Avoid bad fats
Not all fats are bad for you. There are good and bad fats. Good fats are known as unsaturated fats, while bad fats are called saturated fats.
As previously established, instead of cutting out entire food groups, you should substitute unhealthy foods with healthier options.
Saturated fats are bad for your health because they raise the levels of bad cholesterol, which increases the risk of heart disease. On the other hand, good fats that should be part of your diet are unsaturated fats as they help reduce inflammation, fat storage, and the risk of heart disease.
- Olives
- Fatty fish( trout, salmon, sardines)
- Seeds (flax, chia, sesame, pumpkin, hemp and sunflower seeds)
- Oils (canola, sunflower, olive, avocado, sesame oils)
- Nuts (pistachios, pecans, cashews, almonds, walnuts)
- Avocados
- Nut butters
- Tofu
Throw junk food out of the house
We are generally advised to be mindful of the company we keep, as it reflects who we are.
In the same way, you need to be mindful of the food you keep in your house because you are what you eat.
What ruins most people’s diets is unhealthy snacking.
Getting rid of that stash of junk food will help you avoid falling into the cycle of sabotaging your healthy eating goal.
Having junk/unhealthy food in your house makes it easy to reach for it when the craving for snack hits.
You should also consider removing any food-ordering apps from your phone to make it harder for you to order items your body doesn’t really need.
Eat a high protein diet
If you are usually hungry all the time and end up snacking on junk, a protein rich diet is just what you need.
A high protein diet key to clean eating because it helps lower the release of the hunger hormone ghrelin and increases the release of the satiety hormone.
Protein foods
- Turkey breasts
- Beans
- Tuna
- Chicken breast
- Salmon
- Pumpkin seeds
- Eggs
- Lean white fish
- Hummus
- Hemp seeds
- Lentils
- Tofu
- Sweet peas
- Chickpeas
- Quinoa
- Lean beef
- Greek yogurt
- Whey protein
- Edamame
- Cottage cheese
Complete clean eating food list
