What is Clean Eating?

I have realized that not everyone knows what clean eating is and why it's so important.

So, let me tell you about it!

Clean eating is eating all natural food; or food in it's natural state. The most important thing to note about clean eating is that it is not a diet. This is not a fad, or something you do temporarily. This is a lifestyle! The reason that is so important, is because with fad diets or diets in general, it's something you can only do temporarily because it deprives your body of nutrients that you need. Sure, you can lose weight on diets. You can lose a lot of weight even. But it is almost guaranteed that you will gain all of it, and maybe more back, because you can't continue depriving your body of vitamins and nutrients that it needs. It will start to fail you!

To begin the journey of clean eating, start reading the labels of the packaged foods at your local grocery. This goes back to the Fooducate app/website that I mentioned in another post. This is where you can scan barcodes and it will tell you about the ingredients in that food. For example, I looked up Nutri-Grain cereal bars because this is something I used to eat for a quick snack thinking I was making a good choice! Boy was I wrong!!! Here is what Fooducate reveals about these bars:

(click to enlarge)

Pretty scary right!?!? Go ahead and look up the products that you normally buy, I dare you!! Share with me what you find out!!

The above is a great example of why eating clean is so important. It's avoiding all processed and refined foods. This will include almost all packaged foods, and also white flour, refined sugar, bread, and pasta.
Click the links to read about the dangers of white flour and refined sugar. Read my blog post about Ezekiel bread to read about bread. Pasta is bad because most of them use white flour and contain refined sugar.

Hopefully this is a good introduction to the importance of clean eating. I will do a "What is Clean Eating?" continued post tomorrow to show you what kind of meals and snacks are "clean".
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Now for my food and exercise logs.

Today was a rough day. I had a terrible stomach ache all day (the result of my awful eating the last 2 days I am sure) and I woke up at 8:00 and expected to go to the gym today, but I got up and ate and then ended up going back to sleep until 11:00! I felt so crappy I hardly ate anything today (terrible!) I did get a good workout in though without having to leave my house!! Feeling proud about that, but need to get my eating on track. Seems to be one extreme or the other the last few days!

Sunday, Feb. 9th Food Log

Pretty pathetic huh?? At least I ate clean. Just didn't eat enough calories so my body is probably storing up all sorts of fat right now!

Exercise Log

This workout was awful and wonderful at the same time! Super challenging!

12 of each:
Plank w/ Knee to Elbow touch
Burpee w/ tuck jump
Exercise Ball w/ pike pull-ins
Kettlebell swing
Push-ups w/ squat thrust
Squat Jumps
Skaters

Then 11 of each, then 10 of each, then 9, and so on, all the way down to 1. That's a total of 78 each!
Wooohhooo! I feel very accomplished! :)

If you ever have questions about healthy eating, or exercises, please feel free to ask! If I don't know the answer, I have some great mentors that can help out!

-Jen