Clean Eating Isn’t a Fad Diet …. It’s The Real Deal. Learn the Basics of Eating Clean and Reap The Health, Weight-Loss and Fitness Rewards.- Anytime Guy Know Nutrition and Delivers!

At any given time, more than two-thirds of Americans are “on a diet.” Yet only 5 percent will experience lasting weight or fat loss. We’re a nation on a perpetual diet, yet America continues to lead the world in obesity, heart disease, Type II diabetes and metabolic syndrome — a combination of risk factors that predispose people to developing heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

Here’s the irony: Even though American’s are “dieting” more, we’re getting fatter each day.
Enter “Clean Eating” — a simple, common-sense approach to diet and nutrition that ditches the complicated menu plans of dieting gurus; avoids the single-food focus of the worst fad diets; eschews the loopy pseudo-scientific underpinnings of “Detox Diets” and instead emphasizes sensible, nutritious eating. In other words, follow this approach and you’ll be less hungry, more satisfied, healthier, and slimmer … for good.

Clean Eating is the ultimate “un-fad” diet. And once you get the hang of it, you’ll never be able to imagine that you thought eating cabbage soup everyday was the key to getting lean.

The Origins of Clean Eating
The concept of “clean eating” isn’t new.

While it’s a phrase you’ll hear tossed around a lot by bodybuilders, athletes and fitness models, the Clean Eating philosophy has its original roots not in the bodybuilding and fitness communities, but rather in the co-op-shopping-Birkenstock-and-granola-crowd.
That’s right, thousands of buff beach bodies can thank tofu-eating, Deadheads for helping them shape better abs, drop body fat and improve their cholesterol profile to boot.

The Clean Eating philosophy is really based on the natural health food movement of the 1960s, which then got transformed into the “whole foods” approach to eating, which emphasizes consuming foods (preferably organic) that are unprocessed or refined as little as possible before consumption.

Canadian fitness model and author Tosca Reno is often credited with popularizing this approach to eating with her series of Clean Eating cookbooks, but the basics of this diet have been around for decades. Fitness trainer, natural bodybuilder and Burn the Fat, Feed The Muscle author Tom Venuto has been talking about “eating clean” for years, and makes it a central part of his fat-loss and muscle gain plan.

At it’s root, the diet is so common-sense and back-to-basics, that no one really can take credit for developing this approach to diet and nutrition.

Eating Clean: What Exactly Is It?

The basics of Clean Eating are simple:

• Eat a wide-variety of whole, unrefined and unprocessed foods in a form that’s as close as possible to how the foods appear in nature
  


• Avoid processed sugars, especially sugary beverages like soda
  


• Avoid saturated fat and trans fats, and instead substitute healthy, monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats.


• Always combine complex carbohydrates with lean protein and some healthy fats at every meal.


• Spread your food out over 5-6 smaller meals, consumed every 2-3 hours


• Eat for maximum nutrient density. In other words, avoid “empty” calories found in fast food, soda, snacks, cakes and cookies, and substitute in nutrient-dense snacks.


• Pay attention to proper portions and practice portion control
  Drink lots of Kangen water™ (at least 1/2 your own body weight in ounces daily)
  Pretty simple.

Benefits of a Clean Eating Diet

So why would a person want to try Clean Eating? There are a number of proven benefits to Clean Eating:

• Decreased body fat


• Increased lean tissue (muscle)


• Improved energy 3


• General improvements in overall health and immunity


• Decreased risk of certain types of diseases like diabetes, stroke, heart disease and cancers


• Less consumption of pesticides, artificial food additives and preservatives, sodium and sugar


• Less impact on the environment, since Eating Clean is also Eating Green; the foods you preference in a Clean Eating diet are minimally processed, and thus use less energy and produce less waste than highly-processed foods


• Less expensive. Contrary to what you might believe, Clean Eating is actually more cost-effective and less expensive than eating pre-packaged food or fast food. For instance, for the price of a Super-Sized Big Mac Meal Deal, you could prepare an entire pot of healthy soup that would make more than a half dozen meals that are healthier, more satisfying and more nutritionally-dense.


• Sustainable. Unlike fad diets, Clean Eating is a holistic approach to eating that a person can practice for their entire life. You don’t “go on” a Clean Eating diet — you’re always clean eating.

Dear Ryan,


I was in the organic store the other day and they were trumpeting how much better farm-raised organic stuff is compared to the meat we always get from the grocery store. It's slightly more expensive, why should I care?


A: You should care very much, but probably for slightly different reasons.


Ground beef in the grocery store inevitably comes from what we call feed lot farms. Click here to read a LA Times article about these feedlot farms." These places are basically factories, and they bear as much resemblance to the old country farms of our childhood as a cheap Casio keyboard does to a handmade Steinway grand piano.


Cows on these "farms" are production machines for meat and milk. They're fed grain, which isn't their natural diet, and which causes great acidity in their systems. This produces "meat product" that's very high in inflammatory omega-6's and woefully lacking in omega-3's. Here is a great place to get more information about better beef. Click here


They're kept in confined pens and fed antibiotics to prevent the sickness that inevitably arises from the close quarters. They're fed steroids and "bovine growth hormone" to help fatten them up. Then they're "processed." Whether the end product — the meat that winds up on your plate — has the DNA of 1,000 cows in it or not, it's not something you should be eating.


Grass-fed meat is a whole different ballgame. Cows were meant to graze on pasture —their natural diet is grass, and when they roam on pasture and graze on grass their meat is higher in omega-3's and CLA (conjugated linolenic acid), an important fat that has anti-cancer activity and may also help reduce abdominal fat. Since the cattle aren't in confined quarters and they're not eating primarily grains, they don't get sick as much and aren't fed massive quantities of antibiotics.


Now, "organic" meat is somewhere in between the two extremes. It usually means the cows were fed organic grain, which is only a minor improvement since cows shouldn't be eating a diet of grain in the first place. While the perception is that organically raised meat is better than non-organic meat, it's still not nearly as good as grass-fed (pasture raised). Sometimes grass-fed meat is also organic, but some very conscientious farmers who raise real, healthy, pasture-grazing cows don't meet some obscure government standard for organic so they're not able to say their meat is "organic."


I wouldn't worry about it. Given a choice, I'd go with grass-fed over organic every time, though in the best of all worlds, you'd get both. For what it's worth, every study you've ever seen that talks about the bad health consequences of meat eating is looking at people who eat highly processed meat from factory farms. It would be very interesting to see if there are the same negative consequences to eating a diet of grass-fed (organic) beef with plenty of vegetables to balance it out.


No study like that has ever been done, but my hunch is that if people ate that way, the so-called "negative" health effects ascribed to eating meat would disappear.