What’s the perfect diet?
I’ve been interested in this question for a long time. The interests grows out of my desire to feel great and live well.
I’m sure many of you have wondered about these questions and thought that if you could just start eating a certain diet and stick to it, your problems would be solved.
But I’ve learned over the years that the way we eat can do a lot, but it can’t do everything. And I’ve seen so many of my patients beat themselves up because they haven’t been able to live up to some dietary ideal.
Today, I want to talk about how the clean approach to eating can help us get over our desire for food perfection and help us get on with living well.
Going to War
The culture of the United States loves wars, especially in the field of nutrition. In the 1950’s there was the war on a certain kind of fat, namely tropical oils like coconut and palm. This ushered in the age of refined vegetable oils (corn, canola, etc.).
Then came another version of the war on fat, this time on all fat. Fats became the worst nutritional evil. In response, stores were flooded with low fat and no fat products and foods. To compensate for the reduction in fat, food companies added in more carbohydrates.
Ten to fifteen years ago, the whole paradigm swung in the opposite direction. The nutritional world was at war with carbohydrates. Carbohydrates were thought to be the main cause of our health problems. The supermarkets started filling up with lower carb foods that were once deemed evil. The explosion of what is now called the “paleo” diet took the internet by storm.
Today, things are a little different. Due to the internet, we have access to different types of dietary philosophies all at once. The low fat and low carb camps are still out there but they’re nestled between a whole range of competing philosophies about nutrition.
Most of these philosophies have some great ideas. From paleo to vegetarian to the mediterranean approach, each one has helped us put together a little more of the complex puzzle that is optimal nutrition. But none of them hold the complete truth.
The Clean Approach is About Personalization
If we had already proved what the perfect diet was, then we wouldn’t have so many competing dietary philosophies.
I believe that the key to what and how to eat is personalization. This means that we look at where your health is at, what the major issues are, and where you want to go. We take into account as many of the factors in your life as possible including stress, exercise, nutrition, medical history, and sleep.
To personalize a plan for a someone training for a marathon is going to be different than someone who sits most of the day. The same is true for someone with digestive issues versus someone with adrenal fatigue.
What this means is that the idea of a perfect diet or living perfectly clean is a fantasy.
It’s a fantasy that hides the complexity of our daily lives. And sadly it’s often a fantasy people use to beat themselves up, creating more stress and more shame.
Personalization and the Clean Cleanse
I even talk about the importance of personalization for people doing the Clean Cleanse. The program is designed to work for the majority of people but it is not appropriate for everyone all the time.
The Cleanse is a powerful tool that has an incredibly broad reach and can help with many, many symptoms. But it is a program. It has a beginning and an end date. This structure helps to increase its effect and give you some great momentum to build on, but it’s not meant to be lived on.
We restrict our diet and follow the structure for a set number of days. Once the program is finished we can relax, broaden the whole foods we eat, and move into a looser clean style of eating.
The Clean Approach: Whole Foods Minus Toxic Triggers
We don’t make any claims that a particular diet is best. When you’ve spent enough time in the nutrition world, you realize that what works for one person, doesn’t work for everyone.
This often is the problem with success stories for different diets. One person finds great results and then proclaims that it will work for everyone. But what really happened is that a person’s program worked great in a specific context. And this context can make them unaware of why or how other people need something different.
That’s why we like to keep our approach broad enough to be adaptable to whatever type of lifestyle we are living.
So while we don’t believe in perfect diets or other dietary nonsense, we do have a few guidelines that can steer you in the right direction without making you crazy. They are based on our main clean eating principle: Eat whole foods minus your toxic triggers.
Let’s break these down a bit.
Whole Foods
Clean eating begins with the simple idea of eating whole foods as the primary foods in your diet. This idea is something that doctors and health gurus can agree upon. They may not agree on which foods or how much, but across the board, they agree that whole, unprocessed plants and animals are an essential element for health.
Whole foods are the foundation of clean eating. They’re your home base, the foods to focus on daily and to return to when you’re not feeling your best. There are no magic bullets or perfect diets needed—just simple, clean, whole foods. The idea isn’t the sexiest. But maybe our search for the next sexy diet is one of the reasons why we’ve become so confused about how to eat. Sexy may sell, but clean eating works.
When we eat primarily whole foods, we’ve automatically removed most of the junk foods, sodas, preservatives, and chemicals that are flooding our food supply. This alone is a huge step in the right direction and might by itself, over time, clear up our health issues.
I urge you to see what happens when you focus less on perfect diets and more on eating mostly whole foods.
Find your Toxic Triggers
Some whole foods can cause us trouble. Remember, we’re not talking about junk foods or the processed foods we know don’t help our health. We’re talking about the whole foods that may not make us feel our best.
When we start getting into the whole foods that might create challenges for us, we start to see why there are so many different diets. Each person is a little bit different, and each person develops his or her own approach.
We call the whole foods that give us problems “toxic triggers.” These foods can cause indigestion, bloating, inflammation, skin issues, fatigue, and a whole host of health challenges. The more we continue to eat them, the more we may experience health issues, even if we’re primarily eating a diet of whole foods.
While not everyone has the same toxic triggers, we do see patterns. Within the whole foods context, gluten and dairy rank among the most problematic for the most people. After that, toxic triggers are manifested on a person-by-person basis. Whatever the whole food is, for one person it’s God’s gift, while for another person it’s a stomachache.
We'd love to be able to tell you which foods to avoid, but the reality is that getting clear on your toxic triggers requires some personal testing. You can learn how to find your toxic triggers here.
Do Reasonable Experiments
Each of us is different and responds to foods and eating styles in different ways. To figure out what works best, we need to do some experimenting with our food. This doesn’t need to be extreme, in fact, it’s best that the changes you make are not.
Within the context of a clean approach, here are a few tests you can try and notice how you feel (remember these are just examples):
- Eat smaller meals more frequently during the day (ex. five small meals) versus fewer larger meals
- Reduce beans and legumes for 10 days
- Remove dairy and gluten for 10 days
Get a Coach
The opposite of dietary plan that works for everyone is personalization. The trouble with personalization is that it takes some time to figure out and you often need an outside perspective. That’s why it’s very helpful to have support.
A coach can help you clearly define your goals and inspire you to move towards them. When you’re looking to make serious changes, rarely is there anything more helpful than a coach dedicated to your success. This could be a health coach, naturopath, functional medicine doctor, fitness trainer, even a life coach.
Final Thoughts
We can sometimes fall into the trap of thinking that the way we eat will solve all our problems. Some psychologists call this the “diet” mentality.
Yet over the years I’ve found that there’s no one diet that can do everything. Sometimes we need to follow a program to get the results we want or to deal with a specific health issue. And sometimes we follow a cleanse to do some maintenance work and give our body a chance to clean house. But most of the time, the foundation of healthy eating is simple. Eat mostly whole foods minus your toxic triggers.
Once you’ve got that working for you consistently, you'll have a powerful foundation to branch out from. All the other equally important areas of health are there waiting to be improved upon including exercise and sleep, stress reduction and relationships.
What you eat is important, potentially the most important action you can take for your health. But there’s no one way to do it, no perfect plan for you to live up to.
So let’s leave the idea of perfect diets behind. Not only because they don’t exist, but because they set us up for failure in advance.
Instead, carve your own clean path, your own style. There’s a million ways to do it.
This article was originally published on blog.cleanprogram.com
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