How to Eat Clean
If you're looking to shed a few pounds, there's no shortage of people who are lining up to tell you how to do it. Unfortunately, the vast majority of dietary information available today is unadulterated bunk designed to separate you from your income. Most of today's fad diets will enjoy no more longevity than plaid, paisley, fat ties and hula hoops. Sadly, finding worthwhile dietary advice to help you lose weight reasonably and responsibly, and make lasting improvements to your physical condition, can be difficult.
I should clarify that there really is no shortage of diets that work. By that I mean there is a rich abundance of eating practices and prescriptions that will help you reduce your weight. Starvation is one such practice. Eating cardboard is another. Eating lemons for breakfast and lunch is a third. Drinking a glass of castor oil is yet another. Each of those practices will reduce your body weight with alarming rapidity.
However, keep in mind that the important thing isn't just losing weight fast, it's doing so sustainably and responsibly, so you don't undermine your health in the process. It's not hard to lose a few pounds in a few weeks on a fad diet of your choosing. But then what? When you grow weary of starving yourself, or you get sick (literally) of washing down your meal of lemons with castor oil, what will you eat? If you're like most of us, you'll go right back to your US daily allowance of processed carbohydrates, high fructose corn syrup, and sugar-infused junk foods and soft drinks. Correlation? Clue? I think so.
The movement toward responsible weight loss is called clean eating. Like most platitudes, "clean eating" means whatever you want it to mean, and it's subject to all of the horrible dietary misinformation that you bring to it. In the 80's, "clean eating" would have meant high processed carbohydrate, low fat diets (which happened to make most of us obese). Today, clean eating means something vastly different. This will aggravate everyone trying to sell a weight loss powder, potion, or pill, but here's the state-of-the-art clean eating diet prescription in a single sentence: eat meats and vegetables, seeds and nuts, some fruits, little starch, and no sugar. That's all there is to it.