Growing up I lived a very S.A.D. lifestyle. What I meant by S.A.D. is that I ate the Standard American diet, which consisted of cereal, granola bars, spam, ice cream, and chips. Oh my gosh, you name it, I ate it, I’d eat anything and my family didn’t know any better. My parents grew up in the Philippines, they came to America and they fell in love with the idea of being able to have anything and everything in America, so we had it.
But, until around 18, I discovered this idea of eating clean. My brother introduced me to Paleo living and I saw what it did for him and his lifestyle. So we started researching more and more into what is in our food, and how it affects your energy, alertness, your muscle gains and weight. I realized that a lot of my lethargy, tiredness, mental fog, headache was because of the way I was fueling my body.
And so I started the transition into eating more clean and more real. Then I was able to see the amazing benefits of taking out all of these artificial processed foods, eliminating all of those toxins and chemicals and things that harm our body, and replacing it with real food.
So I want to actually define what clean eating is and what eating real actually means. When you eat real foods you are basically eating real, whole foods with little to no processing. Now this means that you are taking things that are found in nature, which means fruits, veggies, nuts & seeds, proteins, and unrefined carbs.
Now, think of processed foods as everything under the sun where it is basically getting processed in some kind of way. Processing means adding any additions of any kind. So this can mean at the far left end of the spectrum — hot dogs, bacon, canned meats, fruit rollups, candy bars etc. Then, there are minimally processed foods where it’s taking applesauce from apples, or sweet potato chips from sweet potatoes, or even putting meat or tuna into a can — that is also a form of processing.
Now let me say this, not all processing is bad. Processing sometimes allows us to get rid of bacteria that might be in our fresh fruits and vegetables. So depending on what we are talking about here, some processing is actually okay for our body to handle. What I want you to try and do is to get to little to no processing, so you can start to eliminate the things that add toxins and harmful substances in our body, and replace it with real foods.
Now what I mean by real food is eating everything that is found in nature. So again, fruits, vegetables, unrefined carbs such as steel cut oats, brown rice and making sure you are eating nuts & seeds, hormone free dairy and oils. There are so many benefits to eating real foods and making sure that you are eating clean. These benefits include preventing life-threatening conditions and diseases such as:
- high blood pressure
- type 2 diabetes
- cardiovascular disease
But not only that clean living helps you to stay healthy, lose fat and have glowing skin and hair. It will help you to lose that mental fog and give you sustained energy throughout the day. It also means being able to finally lose those 5, 10, 20 pounds or more that you have been trying to lose forever.
I hope this post inspires you to take out the S.A.D. junk food and start to incorporate REAL foods so that you can get the health and happiness you’ve always wanted!
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