What is eating clean? If we asked this question in a room, I’m sure you’d get lots of different responses on what that means to everyone which I think is great because eating clean is a journey rather a destination. One person’s way of eating clean might be getting rid of sugary drinks from their diet for 3 months while for another it’s cooking more at home and reducing the amount of takeaway foods they buy. I think sometimes when we want to make better choices and start to eat clean but then life get’s busy and we start to compare ourselves to other people and get embarrassed or feel guilty if we aren’t eating healthy 100% of the time.

So here are some 3 simple steps to start eating clean GUILT FREE!

Eat Whole Foods

Start including more whole foods in your diet. So what are whole foods? Whole foods are fresh and natural foods with no or minimal processing. Think nuts, fruits and veggies. To me, it’s opting to grab a banana rather than a muffin for a snack. Hey if you want that muffin afterwards no problem, at least you filled up with the banana and you might not eat all that muffin. But if you ended up with the muffin, choose a wholemeal healthy variety. Making these tiny changes really do add up. You might not be prepared to change everything in your diet but if you are somebody who use to have a muffin a day, well this is a good place to start.

Cook more at home

When you cook more at home, you are more likely to eat real food. However, this is easier said than done right? For a long time it was just my husband and I. If you ask our friends, they would say you’d find us at some cafe somewhere because we were rarely home. After having a baby, we were no different either so choosing to cook more at home was a big challenge for us because we loved being out and about.

However, there are some perks about staying at home to cook, one of the massive cost savings, having time to actually do the laundry in between and three the house seemed to stay clean. So how did we make the transition to cooking more at home?

We started with meal prepping one a week. Meal prepping was amazing, just having diced raw vegetables ready to go whenever we wanted to make a stir-fry, soup or salad was amazing. It took the stress out of cooking. The other is when we cooked, we cooked double, so there was always leftovers for the next day or pop in the freezer for one of those lazy days.

Eat slowly

Hmmmm your thinking what does eating slowly got to do with eating clean? One of the best cooking shows I loved to watch was Nigella Lawson because she really got the meaning of the joy of eating. We live in such a fast-paced world and so naturally, we eat fast too. We need fast food, to eat fast to do more stuff fast.

So when we take 5 minutes to just sit with no mobile phone to simply eat and enjoy our food, we tend to appreciate the effort made to make such a meal even if it’s just eggs on toast (quite an achievement if you a first time mum with a newborn). It’s the ultimate form of self-care. When we eat mindfully, we are likely to choose foods to cook mindfully and that in itself is a mindful act of love. Ultimately we feel good and will inspire and motivate us to do more of the things that make us feel nice and continue on your wonderful journey to eat clean every day whatever that might look like for you.