3 Ways to Train Your Body To Eat Clean Foods
Introduction
Eating clean is a matter of making healthier choices and deciding what foods or food combinations best suit your goals. But you need your body to cooperate instead of working against you to achieve this healthy living goal. Unfortunately, your body is against you by default. Let’s blame evolution for that.
However, training your body to eat clean foods can be relatively easy. It can also be a fun, reasonably rewarding experience.
Yes, you can surpass your evolutionary design.
3 Ways to Train Your Body To Eat Clean Foods
Here are some evidence-based tips that help train people like you to eat clean foods and avoid junk!
Mindfulness
The Centre for Mindful Eating says that mindfulness is the practice of bringing intentional attention to the internal and external environment while eating. That way, you can better judge your hunger and eat for health and pleasure. For a better, healthier you, your body will then be able to digest and utilize the nutrition in the foods you have just eaten.
To be mindful of what and how you are eating, you have to be in the present moment. How can you achieve that?
According to Christopher Willard (Mindful.org), these six things can help:
- Eat when your body is hungry (e.g., stomach growling), not when your emotions are telling you to (e.g., sad, happy).
- Stop when your body tells you it’s satisfied; don’t ignore your body’s satiety signals.
- Eat with friends or family at specific times and places, not random times and places alone.
- Eat nutritionally healthy foods, not emotionally comforting foods.
- When you’re eating, focus on eating (sit and eat on a plate); don’t do other things (read, stand, use your phone).
- Consider where the food you eat comes from; don’t consider the meal the end product.
Walking or Gentle Exercise
Craving sugary foods? Go for a walk instead! That’s easy, no? Researchers at the University of Exeter found that taking a brisk 15-minute walk made participants less likely to give in to their food cravings than when they remained sedentary.
A more recent review (Codella et al.) pointed out that gentle exercise uses the same dopamine reward pathways in the brain as sugar. So, if you want sugar, exercise. It’s good for you!
Help yourself make better decisions.
In ancient times, our ancestors experienced periods of plenty and starvation. Therefore, they used to “stock up” on calories during periods of plenty. In the modern world, we only experience periods of plenty. We have no shortage of food. Our bodies are constantly craving carbohydrate and calorie-rich foods. But our bodies are still programmed to eat as much as possible should we experience shortages soon.
What can we do? Are we destined to eat these foods forever? Here are some of my tried and tested solutions:
- Clear out your kitchen closets and workspace of foods you may begin to crave. If it’s not there, you won’t eat it. Swap it out for healthy, cleaner snacks.
- Keep yourself from getting too hungry. When you are hungry, you make worse decisions.
- Similarly, don’t go to the supermarket hungry; always follow a list.
- Always carry a protein bar or similar in your pocket – it can be a literal life-saver!
- When you eat out, know in advance what they serve and what you will eat. It saves you the agony of making on-the-spot decisions.
- Don’t be afraid to treat yourself occasionally – as that might be what will keep you sane. Most people can’t keep to a strict regime at all times. You deserve it!
Conclusion
It’s no secret that most people want to eat clean to stay healthy. But you might be surprised to learn that training your body to eat clean is one of the best ways to achieve that goal. The benefit of teaching your body to eat cleaner is that it helps your transition to healthy living faster and easier. The above tricks can assist with that.
We hope you enjoyed our blog post on how to train your body to eat clean, and we would love to hear from you. You can provide your comments on our FB or Twitter profiles or through the comments section below.
You can also check our healthy living or eating clean articles for more health tips.
