Thursday, January 22, 2015

Keeping Clean Eating Simple


The idea of changing your current diet to a CLEAN diet can be daunting.  What will you eat?  What will you feed your family? How do you cook “clean”?  What can you have, and what shouldn’t you?  Is it complicated?  Do you have to buy weird or expensive food?  Sometimes the questions that fly around clean eating can prevent people from taking the plunge.  I would like to put some of those doubts and questions to rest!  You can absolutely eat clean IN A SIMPLE WAY.  Your family doesn’t have to hate you, and you shouldn’t have to make two separate meals.  Here, I give you my top tips that I share with my challengers in order to make the shift to clean eating SIMPLY.
11.        Quarter your plate.  In terms of meals, one of the simplest ways is to quarter you plate, and then fill each section with clean, lean food.  One quarter should be lean protein, like, chicken, fish, lean beef, or pork; another quarter can be from a starchy carb (we frequently have brown rice, baked sweet potatoes, or roasted fingerling potatoes at my house).  The other half should be vegetables, and it should always include something GREEN.  For example, dinner might be a grilled pork chop, baked sweet potato, and frozen veggies.

22.    One-cup servings.  For things that are harder to measure because they are an amalgamation of items, such as soups, stews, and casseroles, a good rule of thumb when it comes to a portion size is to keep it to one cup.  That should help to keep you from going overboard.  If it doesn’t seem like it is enough food, add some vegetables or a salad (which you should probably be doing anyway to meet your carbohydrate from veggies requirement).
33.  Minimize preparation.  Some people prep all meals and snacks on Sundays.  Personally, I don’t have time for that.  For me, Sundays should be for reading, naps, and catching up on the DVR, not three hours of elaborate meal preparation.  I am a firm believer in prepping, and I have found that simply prepping my three snacks a day for the week saves me a ton of time on a daily basis, and if done correctly, can be done in 20-30 minutes.  Keep snacks simple!  Foods that can be easily counted out and divvied up into baggies, like nuts, seeds, or berries work well and don’t take long.  Other items that can be grabbed as a whole and thrown in a lunch bag are also ideal (whole fruits like apples, bananas, and oranges, or a single-serving container of plain Greek yogurt, a piece of string cheese, or a boiled egg).  I try to keep the number of items I have to cut or chop to one; same goes for anything I need to spoon into containers like hummus or cottage cheese.
44.    Reinvent the wheel.  When it comes to meals, you don’t have to develop a brand new arsenal of complicated recipes that you are not sure your family will eat.  Take what you typically have for dinner in a week, and figure out how you can clean it up and make it healthier, and then be conscious of your portion sizes.  Turkey tacos, turkey meatloaf muffins, chicken fajitas, soups and stews, all go over well.  Pinterest is a great source for recipes.  Just pick your poison and search “clean (fill in the blank)”.  You’ll get approximately a million options.
55.      Intentional Leftovers.  Let’s face it:  at the beginning meal planning can be overwhelming!  I notice my challengers are always stuck on trying to choose something different every day for every meal and snack.  One of the ways I combat this is to make intentional leftovers at dinner.  So for example, last night, my husband made turkey burgers.  There are two of us, and we eat a burger a piece, but when he made dinner, he made four burgers.  When I made my plate, I also packed up lunch for the next day.  Lunch for tomorrow is DONE.  All I have to do is throw it in my lunch bag on my way out the door in the morning.  I do that every night.  It saves a ton of time, makes meal planning simpler, and even saves money because I don’t have to come up with a unique lunch every day.  And no extra prep on Sunday J.

66.     Simple additions and substitutions.  What I have noticed with myself and my challengers is trying to make a shift to a healthier lifestyle when your family might not exactly be on board can be tough.  For example, my husband doesn’t eat very many vegetables – at all.  And by at all, I mean his veggie choices are limited to green beans, carrots, and corn, and maybe some lettuce if it is smothered in cheese, bacon, croutons, and lots and lots of ranch dressing.  So I know that when it comes to veggies, I’m pretty much on my own.  Frozen veggies (without sauce or seasoning) are a lifesaver here.  I like the kind that steams in the bag in the microwave, and I will add some Mrs. Dash seasoning to flavor them up.  The hubs just passes on them, for the most part.  Frequently, I have a side salad with grape tomatoes and sliced cucumbers and a little oil and vinegar, and he can have his cheese and dressing bomb.  It is just as easy to throw a white potato in the microwave with my sweet potato, so that we can both have the “baked” starchy carb that we prefer.
Some changes can be much simpler:  whole wheat for white flour bread; whole wheat or corn instead of white flour tortillas; whole wheat spaghetti noodles; brown rice instead of white.  Ground turkey is a natural replacement for ground beef, and if it is seasoned well, your family may not even be able to tell that they are eating something different.
77.        Experiment gradually.  For simplicity’s sake, PLEASE do not pick a week’s worth of new recipes to try all at once.  First, it is so much work!  You need meals that are familiar and uncomplicated, not meals that require seventeen steps and reading a recipe.  That said, I DO encourage you to try ONE new recipe a week.  I LIKE to cook, so I usually choose to try out a new recipe on a Sunday, when I know I will have time to do it justice.  I have found some great go-to weeknight meals to work into our dinner repertoire this way! 
88.    Be progressive.  Consider that clean eating is a spectrum.  Depending upon who you ask, there are different definitions.  There is A LOT of gray area.  But if you are just starting out, and I tell you that you have to make all of your salad dressing from scratch, you can only eat Ezekiel bread, and you have to give up dairy, that is going to be intimidating and overwhelming for you and you are going to give up before you even get started.  Begin simply; plan your meals, avoid fast food, and read the labels on EVERYTHING.  If there are ingredients you can’t pronounce, either look them up to see what they are or don’t eat it.  Eat food that looks as close to its natural source as possible.  After a while, you may feel comfortable with that and decide that as your experiment that week, you WANT to try Ezekiel bread or go dairy-free.  Or maybe not, ever.  I always consider:  am I making progress?  Am I doing better than I was doing last year or last month?
99.       Plan around the sale ads.  So how do you choose what to eat when you are making your meal plan?  Do what I do – plan around the sale ads!  I frequently shop at Aldi, so I will pull up the sale flier on my computer when I am making a meal plan for the week.  I typically look at two things: what kind of meat and what kind of produce is on sale.  I’ll plan dinners (and intentional leftovers for lunch) around the meat on sale and the recipes I know my husband and I can make on a weeknight in 20-30 minutes.  I plan most of my snacks based on the produce on sale.  This helps me not only get ideas for what to plan, but it helps me to save money on the grocery bill, as well.
110.   Have ONE meal per day that you don’t have to think about.  I’m not going to lie; this all takes effort and work, but it does get easier over time.  That’s why I recommend that you have one “duh” meal per day that you don’t have to think about.  For me, that meal is Shakeology.  With my crazy busy life, teaching over 100 teenagers every day, dogs, working out, taking care of my family, etc I need something that I can depend on every single day. Shakeology takes 60 seconds to make and has all the dense nutrition of several servings of salad all in 150 calorie glass. Hello, flat belly foods ;) The energy it provides me is insane and so important since I struggle I have so much on my plate! Trust me - you’re going to LOVE this. And just in case you don’t (but you will!) there’s a 30 day “bottom of the bag” guarantee, so you get to try for yourself and see.


If you would be interested in learning more about clean eating or joining a challenge group, fill out the application!  I promise I will work with you until we can find something that works for you.
In the meantime…

BE FIERCE!










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