What is clean eating?

Clean eating is something I've been vaguely aware of bubbling away in the consciousness of food blogs, magazines etc for a while.  I lumped it in with 'paleo', '5:2', 'raw food' and dismissed it as a fad.  Sorry, I'm no fad dieter, it just doesn't work for me.

"Eat Death" Bruce Nauman, Ca' Pesaro, Venice

I have always had a feeling though that I feel better the more food I make rather than prepare (hence the name for my blog).  I'm sure this is more psychological than physical though.  Something which is made with love is so much more sustaining than something heated up.  When we make food with little input from ourselves, doesn't it make us value it less when we eat it?  I'm not sure.  But something about the above artwork when I saw it in Venice recently struck me as interesting.  We literally are what we eat and some of us are eating ourselves to death.  When I got back home, I watched my copy of "Supersize Me".  He mentioned about 3 days being needed to change habits and that's been humming away in the back of my mind for a month or so.  He's right, with a child, it takes three days.  In three days you can change sleeping habits, eating habits, behaviour.  I suspect adults are no different.

Like all of us, I eat convenience foods from time to time, I don't make every food from scratch.  I've just eaten a slice of toast for breakfast with bread (I didn't make), butter (I don't own a cow) and marmalade (not many Seville oranges in my garden right now).

I wonder though if I tried a bit harder, for three days, if I ate as much food as I could prepared by my own hands, would I feel better about myself?  Would I feel better on the inside?  Who knows?  Let's keep this clear though, I'm not going to be milking any cows, lovely though they are.  I'm happy for milk to be pasteurised for me and made into cheese.  What I am going to miss out on though are processed cereals, preprepared foods (which may make going out with my son more problematic but we'll give this a go), no refined grains and no refined sugar.

Some clean eating practitioners espouse eating several small meals a day, I however, will eat when I'm hungry as that makes more sense to me.

Don't get me wrong, I've worked in the food industry for years and there is nothing unsafe or wrong with prepared foods but I'm at a point when I'm not even sure I'm aware how much 'prepared' food I'm eating and I want to set the reset button.

See my posts to see how it goes:
Stuffed pumpkin and clean eating day 1
Clean eating day 2 chicken tikka
Clean eating, day 3, porridge

So join me on my journey to make my diet a little 'cleaner' for three days and I'll let you know how it all goes and how I feel attempting clean eating.