What Healthy Eating Is

Defining Healthy Eating

It seems like there are new diet fads every day. The most popular are Vegan, Keto, Vegetarian, Paleo, Carnivore, Whole Food Plant Based, and Pescatarian.

Large government and private organizations like the CDC, Healthy.gov, and Harvard health have well-known diet recommendations.

All over the world people are finding success following these different diets and recommendations. If you look at every single one of these diets and recommendations you will notice they all have one thing in common.

The recurring theme is they all recommend eliminating processed foods or avoiding them as much as possible. Seems to me like there is a correlation that eating real food that is in its most natural whole form is the answer to what healthy eating is.

Everyone's body is different, everyone will thrive off a different diet. But if we had to pick one diet for everyone the most important aspect would be eating whole foods that are unprocessed or at least minimally processed.

Processed Food VS Whole Food

Whole foods are any foods that haven't been processed or refined and are free from any additives or artificial substances. Whole foods include vegetables, whole grains, nuts, fruit, legumes/beans, meat, fish, eggs, etc.

The easiest way to recognize whole foods is by looking for foods that are in their most natural state found in nature, for example, tomatoes, grapes, or fish. Whole foods are high in fiber, vitamins, and minerals that fuel your body most naturally.

Processed foods are foods that have undergone modification altering the whole food from its natural state. When we talk about processed foods we are normally referring to the more drastic forms of processing that add extra fat, salt, sugar, calories, and chemicals to our whole foods.

Anything with an ingredients list has been processed to some extent. This process removes nutrients from our whole foods, bleaches them, and combines chemicals, and other additives.

Processed Foods Examples

Below are some of the most common processed foods. Which of these do you eat throughout your week?

Processed Foods List

Meats: Bacon, sausage, chicken fingers/nuggets, fish sticks, hot dogs, deli meats/ lunch meat/cold cuts, potted/canned meats, and spam.

Fruits and Vegetables: Fruit and vegetable juices, fruits canned in syrup, canned vegetables, fruit snacks/fruit roll-ups, veggie or potato chips.

Dairy: Ice cream/ ice cream bars, cheese, yogurt/parfaits.

Grains/Nuts: Cakes, cookies, cereal, bread, biscuits, trail mixes.

How To Find Healthy Alternatives

The processed food industry knows what they're doing and they bank off us picking things off the shelves that are ready to eat and last forever. We all didn't care until we realized what this was doing to our bodies and now we want to build new habits.

Now let us look at some alternatives to highly processed meals. A lot of vegans and vegetarians are choosing to season mushrooms and cook them to replace the popular processed beyond meat.

An easy alternative to breakfast cereals and trail mixes is to make granola from scratch that can be eaten dry or with your favorite unprocessed milk.

Processed granola bars can be replaced with brands like Larabars Apple Pie flavor, ingredients: dates, almonds, unsweetened apples, walnuts, raisins, and cinnamon.

Most plant milk is loaded with preservatives but Elmhurst Unsweetened Milks have only two whole food ingredients water, and your preferred nut, ex. Almond flavor: Filtered water, Almonds.

What about everyone that loves a crunch? Bare Apple Chips have one whole ingredient, Apples!

Mary's Gone Crackers are Organic and their everything cracker flavor has 10 whole food ingredients: Whole grain brown rice, whole grain quinoa, pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, brown sesame seeds, brown flax seeds, poppy seeds, minced onion, garlic powder, sea salt.

Get A Coach

Think about these alternatives when you're planning your new diet for weight loss. Even better, get a Certified Health Coach to help you create a vision of your new life, map out how to get there, and support you along the way!