Clean Up Your Diet By Ditching These 5 Things

Have you reached a point where you’d like to clean up your diet, but, you’re not exactly sure where to start? Well, I have five things that you can ditch right away, that will instantly clean up your diet. 

Clean eating is a diet that sticks to foods that are as close to being whole and natural as possible. Basically, you want food to be close to its natural form, food that is not highly processed. A great example of this is to eat the apple and not drink the apple juice. 

Ditch the processed foods. 

• An easy way to start doing this without feeling overwhelmed or confused about what you should and shouldn’t eat is to shop the perimeter of the grocery store. This is where you’ll find the fresh produce and the refrigerated items that are going to have less preservatives, and a shorter shelf life. 
• Look at the ingredient statement. If you can’t say it, don’t eat it. 
• And since we’re talking ingredients statements, keep the ingredients down to five or less on a product. 

Ditch the Dirty Dozen. What’s the Dirty Dozen? The Environmental Working Group every year evaluates all the fruits and veg, and which ones have the most exposure to pesticides, and which ones have the least exposure. Then, they publish their dirty dozen list. These are the fruits and veg, that have the most exposure to pesticides. These are the ones that you want to be very conscientious of, and buy organic. The other list is the clean 15. These have the least exposure, and you can feel more comfortable buying the regular produce and not having to buy organic. If you want a list of both of them, go to ewg.org and download those lists. 

Ditch the oils and the spreads. 

Vegetable oils and margarine are highly processed. So what does this mean? This means they have a lot of omega-6 fatty acids in them. Now, when our ratio between omega-6 is out of balance with our omega-3 fatty acids, it actually triggers an inflammatory response in our body. We want to avoid that as much as possible. Instead of going for the veggie oil, focus more on avocado oil or extra virgin olive oil. And don’t eat margarine, eat real butter from organic grass fed cows. 

Ditch the sugar. 

Sugar is highly addictive. It actually lights up the same area of the brain as heroin and cocaine. So, when you feel like you have no willpower against sugar, it’s not really your fault. It’s physiological. It lights up that pleasure center of the brain. The problem is when we have too much sugar, it’s going to have an inflammatory response in our body. It is also going to promote insulin resistance, which then will start to contribute to weight gain, especially weight gain in the belly area. If you want to sweeten things up, stevia is a great natural choice. 

Ditch the gluten. Now, 

Gluten is a protein that’s found in a lot of grains like wheat and barley and rye. A lot of us have gluten sensitivities and we might not even know about this. One good way is to do an elimination diet of anything that contains gluten and see if you notice a difference, because if you have a sensitivity to gluten, it might present itself as chronic fatigue, inflammation, or digestive issues. Now, I know for myself personally, when I eat gluten, my joints really flare up and they become quite painful. 

So those are the five ditches I have for your diet to get you on the path to clean eating. 

Peace and Love!