Is eating "clean" really important?

[Christi]

So I fast twice a week and on the other 5 days either eat fairly healthily (between 1300-1600 cals) or just whatever I want, depending whether I am focussing on maintenance or loss.

Now, I know I have about 10lbs of fat to lose to get those abs I so desire. I know I can get there eating about 1400 a day plus fasts. So my question is, is what those 1400 cals are made of important?

I read that it does not seem to matter – so in theory 1400 or cookies or 1400 of quinoa and veggies, the end result should be the same, right? (Of course 1400 cals of cookies won’t fill me up so I wouldn’t be able to stick to that!).

Is it important to eat clean??

And what does that look like?!

[Doris]

There is no definition of eating clean. It varies wildly!

To answer your question, for the purposes of fatloss, it’s simply the caloric total. For purposes of health, energy, attitude, brain function, it most certainly does matter what you eat.

But here’s the thing. When you stick to your allotted caloric total and succeed, it is much MORE difficult to keep going forward if you use any significant percentage of your calories for junk food (which I’ll define as largely empty calories for the purposes of this discussion) on a regular basis.

You can “afford” to have some each day. But not all or you will feel like utter crap (and therefore be less healthy).

So hit your nutritional guidelines as you see fit – perhaps using the RDA values of your government or another of your choosing. Hit your protein requirements. Consider using veggies as a Volumetrics approach so as to not overeat. And with the remaining few hundred calories, have whatever the heck you want!

[sandra]

The short answer is NO. Clean eating or any particular diet belief/religion/cult is irrelevant to losing weight. Bottom line is appropriately low caloric intake. If you are not losing weight, calorie intake is still too high. Laws of thermodynamics and physiology are not suspended because you eat healthy/ clean/ low carb/vegan/ paleo or what ever. It’s all about calories.

Body fat is stored energy like money in the bank. If you keep adding extra calories that your body does not use, you end up with a goodly store of body fat. It is very easy to eat too many calories in the modern world. We are surrounded by food 24/7 and it’s cheap and available. Junk food (sugary starchy fatty processed) is an easy target to bash but the bottom line is there are plenty of overweight people who eat “clean” or “healthy”. They can eat ‘clean’ ’til hell freezes over and still be fat because they are eating too many calories.

Count your calories with online tracker or get a Kitrics scale that weights and measures your food & calories if you are having a hard time. Make sure you are using a low enough RMR estimate. Most people overestimate how much they need to eat. The only style of eating that works is the one you can follow. You need to distinguish between signal and noise. Signal is total calories, Noise is good/ bad foods and diet cults. Forget about that. This is about long term not short term.

[Julie]

No eating ‘clean’ doesn’t matter, however I have found that eating healthy one ingredient foods that I prepare myself make me feel better and perform better. I have found that since I must eat less to lose, I must make those calories count… if I don’t I feel like crap. You have to find what works for you. What works for me is mostly the least additives possible. In fact I have found recently through trial and error that several of the chemicals in food are causing me to break out with sores.. on a very small scale but the same type of sores I see on meth users.. which is their bodies trying to get rid of toxins.

I’ve learned I don’t have to be 100% organic anymore, and that going out to dinner with friends will not kill me. But in finding my own way I went from 100% organic to overboard on splenda/sugar free jello and pudding and started developing sores … so now I’m back to my happy medium, mostly organic with only occasional foods with chemical ingredients since limiting them made my sores go away. Everyone must find their own way… different people have different reactions to food.. and different combinations that make their “less calories” sustainable.

[susan]

I agree with everything that has been said so far but I will stress one important thing – the need to eat clean varies for everybody! Though the science behind calories in/calories out is spot on, for some people (ME!) it really does matter WHAT those calories are made of. I think it takes some experimenting to see if you can lose or function with more processed foods, but for me I have found that I can only function properly on whole foods, nothing processed, and I follow strict food-combining principles. This doesn’t mean that I always eat this way (I am human after all) it just means that when I don’t, I expect to not feel very great and most likely carry around some extra baggage for a few days 😉

To answer the “what does clean look like” question I would just say focus on whole foods – fruits, veggies, etc… – and avoid anything with ingredients you can’t even pronounce! There are many different beliefs as to what clean is and how extreme you need to be…I personally believe that going to the extreme is unecessary and not a “maintanable” way of life….just make smart choices and know that you’re doing your body good!!!

[Christi]

Thanks everyone. I totally agree with what you said. It is what I thought, but you know how it is…. One Google and you no longer know what you thought you knew….

So today, for no special reason, I ate really well – a homemade oat and coconut flour cake thing for breakfast (ok, not terribly healthy as it had cocoa powder, sugar and choc chips in it, but also coconut oil and nothing else, and hell I made it and it tasted good), salmn and shredded veggies for lunch, and homemade gluten free flat bread “pizza” for dinner. And a danio yogurt after my weight training.

And I feel SO much better than I did on Saturday when I had pizza hut pizza and a choc cookie dessert there – yuk, I felt horrible for the rest of the day!

So, anyway. I plan on tightening up my eating after a few days of being very generous to myself, as my waist measurement seems to be creeping up …. Which is not the right direction! I like the idea of about 90% healthy/ “clean” and 10% what-the-hell!

[Julie]

By the way….one of my friends eats “clean” but does the 6 meals a day approach which I am sure is above her caloric needs. She could do that in her 20’s…same kind of calories as before but now her 6 clean meals are slowly making her gain weight.

I told her once about IF…only to be told again and again and again about how my metabolism will slow down.

I try to eat a bit clean myself but that’s because I get bloated at the drop of a hat by certain processed foods. Heck, even clean food bloats me like “organic irish oatmeal”, and well, any type of grain and dairy(even organic! YIKES) makes me bloat and live in the bathroom.

But 6 meals a day? No thanks.

Yesterday I fasted. Broke it with as someone suggested broth with veggies. Yum! Had my main meal(I admit it was pretty clean but had yummy nonclean brownie to go with it. After that was pretty good..and even skipped my next meal because I was just not hungry for it. Still, overall my calorie consumption, brownie included was low.

I teach a bootcamp in the evenings twice a week and one of the women in my bootcamp tells me that she is having a hard time losing weight and actually gained. She also was eating tons of clean, “organic ” bars from the health food store with healthy organic cane sugars. She is also vegan but when she told me what she was eating, I was wondering where the vegetation was in the vegan. Hardly any. Tons of Organic bars with organic direct trade sugars or what have you….

Hmm.. no wonder she couldn’t lose weight. I told her to replace her “organic bars” with an “organic” apple.

[ruth]

There is a certain on-line to community (to remain nameless) where all the women constantly repeat the mantra, “You’re not losing weight because you’re not eating enough.” Then lurkers read these posts and create threads saying things like, “I can’t seem to lose weight anymore. I lost weight last year by eating 1100 cals/day. Right now I’m eating around 1700cals/day and I workout 3x/week. Do you think I’m still eating too little to lose weight?” No. I’m. not. making. this. up. Some of you might even be able to guess which forum I’m talking about.

[Kelly]

I want to admit that for a while I also ate really clean (that’s what Oxygen magazine told me!) yeah…I ate really clean eating 6 meals a day.

Initially lost weight because at the time I wasn’t used to exercising but as my body became more efficient I burned less calories( I learned this through exercising with my polar heart rate monitor. I don’t use it anymore for heart rate training zone nonsense but at one time I did…I now do it to see my cals burnt not that it can calculate afterburn..but it’s cool to see that that a 2 mile run in which I burned 200 calories 4 years ago, well that 2 mile run now only burns 100 if I am lucky!)..I kept eating those 6 CLEAN meals a day and my weight was creeping back up. When I wore my polar for a few of my running and biking sessions to figure out what was going on…I realized that my body was now way too efficient with the cardio…

I came to the conclusion that I should drop one of those clean meals. But then I was bombarded by the starvation myth at that time. God help us if instead of eating 6 I should only eat 5. I might wither away to nothing!

ok,,,off to drink my organic, froufrou fair trade coffee.

[Anna]

when I had to cut out wheat.. my doctor told me to make sure I started taking a multi vitamin since I was eliminating an entire food group and I might suffer some vitamin deficiencies. I was like.. ummmm…. ? Medical Doctors don’t get trained in nutrition and they write the articles about it? Go figure!

[Eva]

Eating “Clean” has no definition. I assume it to mean something about having less highly processed foods and eating more less processed looking foods. This gets to the issue of what counts as ‘processed’ and where your personal limit is for degree of processing and how much of that food you’ll be happy eating. This doesn’t even get to the point of discussing organic vs standard foods etc. My opinion is to eat a mix of foods that satisfy your appetite. Variety is likely the best thing to strive for and eliminating any one entire food category is likely not an answer.

[SusanMiller]

I think it is important to eat clean and healthy.

[rodders]

In my opinion eating clean means not consuming empty calories.
Yes you can fill up on ice cream , cakes, pop tarts etc etc but these are not good calories.
Good calories come from protein, some fruits and vegetables.
You could eat rubbish all day but I doubt you’d be very healthy after a week.

[Author]

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