7 Clean Eating Tips for Beginners

There are hundreds of diet plans and nutrition plans people use to lose weight. However, not many of them tell you what to do once you’ve reached your weight loss goal. Clean eating is a diet plan that can be seen as a lifestyle, especially with the best clean eating tips for beginners.

These clean eating tips for beginners can help you reach your weight loss goals, eat healthier, and live a healthy lifestyle. Almost every diet plan we come across has the potential to help us reach our goals.

Some of us have weight loss goals, and others just want to improve our overall health. The problem with these diets is that they never tell you what to do to maintain those goals once they are reached.

We end up wandering around the grocery store, avoiding junk food, reading nutrition labels, and doing our best not to mess up all the hard work we put into our goals. Then, there is the clean eating diet plan.

Of course, clean eating is not touted as a diet plan, though weight loss is a side effect. Instead, clean eating is sold to us as a clean eating lifestyle. The idea is simple: eat clean and reach your goals.

The question is, why does eating clean make a difference at all? Unfortunately, we are surrounded by foods and drinks that are highly processed. Processed food and drinks are options that have been altered from their natural state.

That could mean anything from a complete frozen dinner to a simple can of fruit. The problem with processed food is that it needs additives to keep it tasty long enough to ship to the store, sit on the shelf, and then sit in our kitchens for weeks before it goes bad.

Those things include artificial ingredients like added sugar, sodium, high-fructose corn syrup, and transfats. These things can lead to health issues like weight gain, obesity, heart disease, and even some cancers.

We want to remove those ultra-processed foods with unhealthy fats and artificial sweeteners with healthier choices. The best part is that we aren’t eliminating whole foods. Instead, we are creating a healthy diet that we can use for the rest of our lives.

The trick is finding a great way to make these meal plans last that long. For that, we need some clean eating tips for beginners to enjoy unprocessed foods more often and eat a balanced diet with real food.

Clean Eating Tips for Beginners

What are The Rules for Clean Eating?

The rules for clean eating are straightforward on paper but a bit more difficult in practice. Still, there is only one way to explain the rules of clean eating; the rest of the tips for beginners will help us put those rules into practice.

The idea is to eat whole foods, and no, that doesn’t mean eating only food from the grocery store called Whole Foods. Instead, whole foods here refer to whole grains, whole fruits, whole veggies, lean proteins, and just nutrient-dense foods.

The best way to think about this is in the produce section of the grocery store. We can find processed peaches in a can in the canned food aisle. However, we can also find whole peaches in the produce section.

The clean eating pick would be the whole peaches from the produce section. We want the food we buy to be as close to its natural state as possible. Of course, this means that a lot of the convenient options like fast food or even at the grocery store won’t work.

Removing convenience is a problem for a lot of people thanks to the busy lives we lead. Another problem is that the whole peach could cost nearly double the price of the canned option.

These are problems we need to solve with these tips for eating clean. Think of it this way: clean means unprocessed. 

Clean Eating for Weight Loss on a Busy Schedule

Preparing meals is one of the most important clean eating tips for beginners. Yes, this will take some practice, but meal prep is the best way to battle the clock when trying to stick to a clean eating plan. How does meal prep work?

There are two ways to get meal prep done. We should find the method that works for us so that our eating habits remain consistent with a clean diet for every meal. We could simply make more of a single recipe on the nights we have time to cook.

The leftovers can be used all week long. Another option is to prep the ingredients in a freezer bag and then store it in the freezer. This method works best with crockpot or instant pot recipes.

Pull the freezer bag out of the freezer the day before you plan to cook and empty it into a crockpot or instant pot when you want to cook it. You can stock up on healthy meals for the entire week, and for however many meals you want.

This is a clean eating journey that goes above and beyond fad diets. The question is, how will we afford all of the types of foods we need?

Clean Eating on a Budget

Clean eating tips for beginners would be pointless if we can’t find a way to fit clean eating into our budgets. One of the saddest truths of life is that unhealthy foods are often cheaper.

This is because unhealthy foods use lower-quality ingredients and far cheaper alternatives. You can also blame the need for all of the added sugars and preservatives in processed foods as well.

Healthy eating seems very expensive and impossible for most of the country. Here is the trick: utilize cheaper cuts of meat, stock up on fresh fruits and vegetables when in season, and find clean canned food options that fit within your budget.

Not every meal needs to be grass-fed beef with locally sourced veggies and leafy greens. Instead, we just need to find the options that fit in our budget. We can easily find recipes for literally any food on the internet.

Food does not need an “Organic” label on it to be clean, nor does it have to be organic produce. Yes, those things might be better, but that orange in the produce section was not more or less processed than the one you find in the organic section.

Clean Eating Grocery List

It is true we are surrounded by unhealthy food, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible to find healthier foods. Creating a list of foods you can buy would be pointless as it would be too long for anyone to follow.

Instead, a better idea is to stick with food that requires us to cook it from scratch. That is the easiest way to think about shopping for clean eating. Fresh produce, fresh meat, whole grain bread, and that’s all we really need.

Dairy is where things can get really complicated. Dairy products are processed for safety reasons, meaning an absolutely clean diet would be dairy-free. However, we don’t have to ditch dairy.

Instead, stick to what is considered to be healthy processed foods. Healthy processed foods are mostly dairy foods like whole milk, cheese, and yogurt. We can also use milk alternatives like almond milk, rice milk, or soy milk.

The catch is we have to stick to the unsweetened versions of milk alternatives.

Foods to Avoid When Eating Clean

No one likes to hear about what they can’t have while on a diet plan. However, this is not one of those fad diets that is going to tell you to ditch all of the good stuff. Instead, clean eating tips for beginners show us that all we need to do is actually care about what we put in our bodies.

This requires a bit of work, and there are still things we should avoid. However, things aren’t as simple as don’t eat those cookies. We want to avoid white flour, sugar, refined grains, fast food, and salty snack foods.

The last thing anyone on a clean eating diet needs is artificial anything, including sweetener, color, or sodium nitrate. Lastly, we want to avoid sugary drinks, anything with added sugar, and foods with preservatives.

We don’t need to look at nutrition labels. Instead, we focus on the nutritional value and ingredients of the food we buy. Most things in a natural form will be fine; we can reap the natural health benefits from natural ingredients.

So far, this sounds like a lot of work. However, we put more work into planning a vacation than we do our own health. It is time that changes, and knowing the benefits coming our way might make things easier.

What Happens to Your Body When You Start Eating Clean

There is nothing better than hearing about the benefits you get from your hard work. The Mayo Clinic says that eating clean will “fill your body with plentiful vitamins and minerals, high quality protein and healthy fats, which improve heart and brain health, assist with weight management, build a stronger immune system and increase energy levels, among other benefits. Foods in their natural state are more flavorful.” Surprise!

Eating the food your body wants improves every aspect of your body. Here’s the thing: processed foods go through different processes that help make them taste better, last longer, and look better.

It is almost literally putting makeup on a pig. We see you, pig, and we know you are a pig. Those processes diminish the vitamins and minerals that occur naturally in the food.

Think of it this way: it is like adding water to beer; add enough water, and the beer won’t make you feel anything. Same idea here: add too many processes, and your body won’t be able to pull nutrients from the food anymore.

How to Make Clean Eating a Lifestyle

​We know what clean eating is now, and we know how to fit it into our lifestyles. We know what food is good for us, and we know which foods are bad for us. Getting to that healthy weight is a lot easier; improving our mental health is a no-brainer, and eating nutritious foods will get us there.

These clean eating tips for beginners will help us all receive the essential nutrients our bodies need to just be better. There are plenty of diet plans we can try that will get us those results, sometimes quicker.

However, none of those plans tell you what to do after you reach your goals. The answer? Switch to clean eating or start with clean eating and make it a lifestyle. The biggest problem with eating clean is going to be maintenance.

Luckily, there is a solution for that: 80/10/10. The 80/10/10 rule is simple to follow and will help us maintain a healthy diet that will keep the weight off. We want to eat completely clean 80% of the time, eat semi-clean 10% of the time, and eat junk food 10% of the time.

We shouldn’t apply this rule to our nutrition plans until we have hit our goals. However, once we reach our goals, things change from reaching a goal to holding it. Allowing yourself to cheat every now and then is fine at this point.

Moderation is key and a good way to stay motivated. 

Clean Eating Recipes

21 Clean Eating Breakfast Recipes for Beginners | Starting your day with a clean meal is easier than you may think.

21 Clean Eating Recipes with Chicken | Clean Eating Diet Recipes | Chicken is an easy meat to fit into any diet plan out there for so many reasons.

Clean Instant Pot Recipes with Beef to Savor | Beef can be clean and the recipes will be delicious. You will find results when you’re this happy to eat the food in your plan.

Clean Instant Pot Recipes with Chicken | The Instant Pot can help us stay on track during those days when we just don’t feel like cooking.