What's in your food?

But on a serious note, this is where I get on my soapbox. You are so very much what you eat. If you put in garbage, that’s how you’ll feel and even look. Seriously, watch “Hungry for Change”, a documentary on Netflix that will radically change your perspective on food. You’ll learn the best kept secrets of food industries, reasons your diets never work, and all about food additives and how our bodies aren’t meant to process “man-made” foods, which affect the body’s hormone levels and cause weight gain. The most important things you should know about eating are in this documentary, I promise you.

I’ve been trying my best this past year to eat cleaner. To eat “clean” means to eat whole, nutrient-rich, unprocessed foods and to avoid processed foods, artificial ingredients, or preservatives. This means making more meals from scratch, not eating fast food, and skipping the snack aisle. The most important component of clean eating is paying attention to the ingredients in what you’re eating. (Seriously, check out the documentary.)

Basic clean eating can be described like this:

-Don’t eat anything out of a package/jar/can without checking the list of ingredients. If the list is really long (meaning very processed and probably loaded with artificial stuff), don’t eat it. Check out the back of a box of cheez-its, you’ll know what I mean.

-And since we’re talking about ingredients, you should never eat anything containing hydrogenated oils, refined anything, MSG (which goes by tons of secretive names), or high fructose corn syrup.

-What’s the first ingredient? The first ingredient is what the product contains most of (and the last ingredient, the least). Here’s a box of fruit loops. The first ingredient is sugar, the list is super long, it contains hydrogenated oil, artificial colors, and preservatives.

-Don’t get fooled. Policing that ingredient list is now your job. Make sure you know what’s in what you’re eating. Kraft makes a guacamole dip that has, get this, no avocado. Zero. Watch out.

Now I know that eating completely clean at every meal might not happen, and I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always eat clean. If you're fairly new to this, the 80/20 rule works (eating 80% clean on a daily basis). I like to try to push it as close to 100% as I can (keyword "try"). Whatever you choose, you’ll be able to make well-informed decisions. Don’t think with your taste buds!

Now go take a look through your fridge and cupboards and ask yourself, “can I replace this with something unprocessed, fresh, or organic?”