Clean Eating: Best Tips, Plan and Recipes
We explain what clean eating means here. Plus tips and recipes for changing your diet…
Have you ever had a look at the ingredients list for your candy bar? Or that fix-it-yourself sauce? E-numbers, tons of terms you’ve never heard of or tongue twisters you don’t even know the first thing about. Often enough, we don’t know exactly what we eat every day. With Clean Eating this changes quickly …
What is Clean Eating
Tosca Reno is considered the Eat Clean Queen, the American lived in an unhealthy relationship for a long time, was overweight and described herself as a sugar addict: ice cream, peanut butter and all sweet things were not safe from her. At the age of 40 she finally pulled the handbrake, changed her life – and her eating habits. Her book on the Eat Clean Diet became a bestseller.
The Clean Eating nutritional concept focuses on unprocessed, i.e. natural food without artificial additives and refined sugar. But the concept consists of other important pillars:
- Regional ingredients
- Seasonal fruit and vegetables
- Meals freshly prepared
- Wholemeal products (“wholemeal products”)
- Low sugar/free
- Low salt
To eat “clean” means to deal more with food again and perhaps even to expose oneself to unusual taste experiences … How about actually tasting the components of a main course instead of drowning them in a thick cream sauce?
Clean Eating encourages us to cook fresh food ourselves, using food that is ideally local and in season. Doesn’t sound that hard, does it? We have put together a few more tips for you.
What can I eat at Clean Eating?
A lot! Those who do without ready meals and other industrially processed foods do not automatically do without delicious food! These delicious foods are on the Clean Eating menu:
- Fresh fish
- Fresh meat
- Wholemeal food
- Seasonal and regional vegetables
- Herbs
- (Unsweetened) dairy products
- High quality fats and oils
- Nuts
- Natural sweeteners such as honey or fruit sugar from fruit
Beware of …
- Drinks! Not only lemonades & co. contain sugar and additives, also flavoured water often contains added sugar and artificial flavours.
- Diet or light products! Even if they do not contain refined sugar, they have other ingredients that are not clean.
8 tips for changing your diet
- It is quite possible to lose a few kilos with Clean Eating, even if this is not the main focus. Remember: If you eat a pack of nuts with many calories instead of your favourite chocolate, you will probably not notice any weight loss …
- This does not mean that you generally have to do without all foods with a high calorie content! Because calories alone do not determine whether a food is good for you. Nuts, for example, contain important nutrients – not a pizza, which has many calories but unfortunately no important nutrients. So: High-quality, nutritious food yes, in the right measure!
- Tosca Reno recommends six smaller meals a day to keep the blood sugar level constant and prevent ravenous appetite.
- In addition, she advises to combine complex carbohydrates (e.g. wholemeal pasta) with low-fat proteins (e.g. chicken) in each meal to provide the body with the best possible supply.
- Organic = clean and healthy …? Not necessarily. Even organic finished products can have a long list of ingredients and contain undesirable ingredients such as sugar.
- At lunchtime in the cafeteria, in the evening in the restaurant and a muesli bar in between when things have to be done quickly – we often eat on the side during the day because time may not allow otherwise. A well-planned weekly shopping trip and meal prep can help.
- The use of the salt shaker already happens automatically during cooking, and we have many delicious alternatives for seasoning. Here we present suitable salt substitutes. Too much salt can be unhealthy under certain circumstances, we will tell you here when you should start thinking about it.
- Another tip from the Eat-Clean-Queen: Don’t skip breakfast! It supplies us with energy and makes us productive.
Plan and recipes
This is what a clean eating day can look like for you – a few suggestions:
- Breakfast: Protein Overnight Oats
- Snack: Banana
- Lunch: Grilled chicken with chermoula and couscous
- Snack: A handful of nuts
- Dinner: A portion of salmon with potatoes and vegetables
- Midnight snack: Natural yoghurt with fruit
Clean Eating: Advantages and disadvantages
Behind Clean Eating is a fully-fledged and balanced nutritional concept, which is certainly not brand new, but which brings us back to healthy eating. One may not expect miracles, however, as Diplom-Ökotrophologin Brigitte Neumann explained to t-online.de: “Who is healthy, can remain that with Clean Eating. If you get sick, you should not give in to the illusion that you can cure diseases with Clean Eating. If you want something good for yourself, you might even overshoot the mark and try to do everything “right” by dogmatic behaviour. In the worst case, you might end up with orthorexia nervosa, the addiction to healthy food. So it is important to listen to yourself and your body – and also to let fives straighten up.