I don’t know about you but I try to keep a healthy lifestyle for myself and my family. It’s not always easy and temptations abound. With three active and busy kids, it’s hard to always find the time to eat well and exercise, but I do try. I’m even more motivated now postpartum with my third and likely last kid. Here’s a guest post with some great tips to help you and your family live and eat healthy.
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Whether you are newly interested in fitness and health or just looking for a new routine, many trendy diets sound either too gimmicky or too restrictive. Along with the Paleo diet, the gluten-free diet, and the raw food diet, “clean eating” popularly enters the conversation.
However, unlike the fad diets, clean eating advocates a nutritionally complete diet that’s easy to maintain and sets up long-term lifestyle changes. It’s not about how much you eat as much as about food’s freshness and quality.
Ready to energize, lose weight, and feel great? Follow these easy tips to start clean eating and improve your health.
Skip Processed and Go Natural
Processed foods offer convenience but at a heavy cost. Essentially, kick out all the whites — including sugar, flour, rice, etc. — and read ingredients carefully.
Completely unprocessed foods include fresh fruit and vegetables, dried legumes, nuts, and farm-fresh eggs. Minimally processed foods like grain-fed beef and hormone-free dairy also fit the diet. Unrefined grains such as brown rice, whole-wheat bread and pasta, and quinoa are all good clean eating choices.
Eat various vegetables zealously, but take more caution with fruit. Though essential, too much fruit tampers with blood sugar levels. The two food groups should account for about three-fifths of each meal.
Also, make sure to space out your protein intake, including some in every meal. Protein builds muscle and keeps you fuller longer.
Hydrate Often
In general, drink water for hydration since soda contains major sugar, diet sodas compensate with artificial sweeteners, and fruit juices mix refined sugars with already high levels of natural sugar. Sorry, but alcohol too gets the boot — it’s a toxin.
Sugary drinks can potentially add 400-500 calories to a diet whereas water flushes out toxins, boosts your metabolism, and helps your body absorb vitamins and minerals.
Drink at least eight six- to twelve-ounce glasses of water daily. Adding half of a lemon’s juice to warm water helps digestion and aids immunity. Supplement with unsweetened teas and modest coffee intake, but try to keep your caffeine intake to the morning.
Monitor Fats, Sugar, and Sodium
Naturally, most clean foods already are low in fat, sugar, and sodium. Processed foods feature heavy-handed additives.
Substitute refined sugar and artificial sweeteners with natural options such as honey, maple syrup, dehydrated sugar cane juice, and coconut oil.
Coconut oil, olive oil, and nut oils also aid in cooking as appropriate and healthy fats. Good fats also include fish, avocados, eggs, dairy, nuts, and grass-fed beef. Start a meal plan or food journal to help keep the bad ingredients at bay, and look for alternative healthy products from BodyApplicators.com that can help make your diet a success.
Portion Control
Some nutritionists advise five to six meals a day. Usually, this translates to three moderate meals and two smaller snacks.
This eating pattern promotes continuous fat-burning, unlike skipping meals which causes the body to go into starvation mode, clinging to calories and as much fat as possible.
Still, calorie intake remains a factor regardless of your meal’s ingredients. Whether you stick to three regular meals or up the count, don’t overdo the portions.
Allow for Indulgences
Binge snacking tempts any dieter. However, clean eating doesn’t mean perfect, one hundred percent adherence. Treating yourself certainly isn’t prohibited.
However, define your treat in frequency, type, and quantity. Some clean eaters opt for an entire “cheat day,” while others bend the rules at one meal per every week or two. Will you allow a dessert? Or simply add some extra cheese to your pasta?
Regardless, stay consistent, and make sure you don’t break your clean eating routine every day. Plus, dig into clean-eating recipe books; even old favorites get a suitable revamp by substituting ingredients.
Exercise
For optimal health, you need to focus on physical fitness; it is the ideal complement to clean eating. Regular exercise allows you to burn more calories while resting, tone and build muscle, and boost heart, lung, and bone strength.
Choose rejuvenation. Join the clean eating movement for a happier life from the inside out.
Disclaimer: This is a sponsored post written by Miles Young. However, I do believe and advocate that families support a healthy lifestyle and think that these are some great tips.
Clean eating rocks! I have been doing this since mid August and have lost 11 pounds. I am now at my goal weight and couldn’t be happier!
The getting rid of the white is an important and difficult step isn’t it?
Thank you for the great read, Great help!
These are great tips. Most of them I’m already aware of but I have a hard time sticking to. These reminders and new tips are great for helping me to get back on track!
Thanks for the tips! I have had issues with food for my entire life really and need to start eating cleaner!
Awesome tips, My family has recently committed to eating clean… not easy. I miss my junk food lol, but baby steps hopefully will work for us
Nice tips!
I wish I can get on the roll and drink enough fluids. Seems like such an easy thing to do. But is it? 🙂
Interesting article. Thanks.
I was just made aware of clean eating and love the concepts.
Interesting article,I really enjoyed reading about the tips and ideas,its s easy to go a stray
Great tips! The biggest thing with me when I try to start eating clean again is that I put a lot of pressure on myself and do not allow myself to indulge at all. As a result, I have massive cravings all the time and it’s so distracting! I am definitely going to take your advice and allow myself to indulge once in a while!
Thank you for Clean Eating tips. I especially enjoyed that you mentioned to hydrate, something often forgotten, and also to indulge just once in a while!! Great post!! 🙂
Drinking water to so important to healthy living
I agree with portion control! Thanks for the tips!
Thanks for the great tips. I am trying to live a healthier lifestyle but its definitely not always easy!
Thank you for the tips and motivation!
Thanks for all the great tips. I have some major GI issues so I really need to start eating clean and hopefully it will help some. Now just to get started and to stick with it!
I love this post. I started clean eating in june and lost 30 lbs just by eating clean. You’ve highlighted everything I followed to help me on this journey. Im happy that I lost the weight but more happy because i feel so much better, more energetic.
Great tips!
We have managed to kick out a lot of whites from our home except for rice, which we are slowly transitioning to wild or brown rice. Thanks for these great tips!
These are some great tips. Thanks for sharing. We do pretty good at eating the right foods but sometimes we slip a little. We have to stay on track.
Clean eating is definitely one of my life goals. I hear amazing things from friends about how much better they feel. I try to eat right but yikes I do enjoy bad things like potato chips. Need more willpower! Thanks for the info.
Great tips! It is not easy to initially cut out the junk food – the cravings are there for sure… That is why I definitely believe in a cheat day; not where you go crazy BUT where you can treat yourself in a smart way. It really helps to avoid an all out binge or wanting to quit when you know you can have a treat.
Some good tips here. While I highly doubt that I will ever be a true “clean eater”, there are many ways that I have been making my diet cleaner. Thanks for the article!
All good tips. You just to have to make the commitment to do & maybe hold off on the treats for the first couple of weeks
Thank for the interesting post. I wasn’t sure exactly how eating clean worked but now I am quite interested in finding out more.
Those are great tips! I love the go natural and abandon the process!
Jeannie Lam
those are some great tips
Portion control is my worst enemy. My eyes may be bigger than my stomach but I can tell you my butt still the biggest!! LOL
I find with clean eating I feel and look so much better. I can always tell by my skin if I have been eating too much processed food.
I have a fiancé and toddler that are very fussy eaters but I have chosen to purify my diet for the most part(some cheating, unfortunately) but I have taken to drinking lots of water, cutting out the majority of carbs and was exercising in 2014. I have to get back into my exercise routine as it is hard to get motivated to do it BUT I have lost 65 lbs since May of 2014 and managed to maintain this over Christmas so I am quite proud of that. I have about 10 more lbs to lose but they are trying really hard to cling to me. It’s so much easier to eat fruits and veggies in the summer so maybe once it starts to get warm, I be able to start going for walks again and finally dump those last few pesky lbs. Thanks for the great guest post.
That salad looks fantastic! Good luck with clean eating!
awesome tips and tricks thanks for sharing , i need to start clean eating myself 🙂