What exactly is "Clean Eating"?

I consider clean eating as eating only whole foods....no additives, no altering. Basically meat, vegetables and whole grains.

That being said, I'm a dirty, dirty girl...eh, I mean eater.

'Clean Eating' is a marketing term used to sell books and it's completely arbitrary.

@ OdesAngel -- I use seasoning...no dressing. Seasonings have one ingredient.

As well my vegetables, milk, cheese.

Cookies in a bakery have no label on them when you look at them at first, same thing at tim horton's

@ OdesAngel -- I use seasoning...no dressing. Seasonings have one ingredient.

not necessarily true. Depends on whether you buy only whole seasonings and grind them yourself. A lot of seasonings actually contain fillers, and no they aren't listed on the label. Anything below a certain percentage does not have to be listed. So maybe you aren't eating as clean as you think.

I've heard of clean eating but don't really know what it means exactly.
Does it mean for example, that if you're making a Pasta/Spaghetti Sauce, you make it using actual Tomatoes and not ones in the Can?
So No Canned or Packaged foods, right?
If so, that's not so easy or cheap to do! :noway:
Would love to see some Meal idea's.

As others have said, the term doesn't really mean anything.

But you certainly can try to make pasta sauce with fresh and whole tomatoes and see if that works for you. I sometimes do because I grow tomatoes and when they are plentiful I'm desperate to use them any way possible, and I make a lot of sauces that rely on chopped tomatoes and other veggies vs. a red sauce kind of thing, but for the latter I think it's much easier and just as tasty to use a good canned whole tomato. (The posts about buying just tomatoes are interesting, since I've never actually noticed canned tomatoes with other stuff, other than the obvious basil or garlic, etc., which I do prefer to add myself. Maybe it's just the kind of tomatoes I've always bought.) Back in the day I went through a phase (oddly enough when I was gaining weight) where I was really purist about food and wanted to rely on whole tomatoes rather than canned for everything, but I no longer see any purpose to that. (During the same period I was all about making pasta from scratch, but I rarely do that anymore, partly because I mostly have pasta for a quick meal, and while I can whip up a tasty and healthy sauce super fast, I can't make fresh pasta that fast and I see no problem with dried. I don't actually eat pasta that much lately, but not because I'm against it or anything.)

Beyond that, if you want to use mostly whole foods (most of my dinners and breakfasts are whole-food based, although I can't say that for lunch, since I buy it often, although from places I think have good quality food), you can choose meals that are less time-consuming than making fresh pasta and a red sauce from fresh tomatoes would be. I usually just have some sort of meat, some sort of vegetable or two, and a starch or fruit or both, depending on how large a meal I want. I have a huge number of meals I can make based on what's on hand in about 30 mins (maybe longer with cooking time, but not much) following this model.

Oh, and I'm not even a "clean" eater. I like to cook and eat a lot from whole foods and lots of vegetables and such, though.

If you want to look at my dinners, my diary is open, although I only list ingredients, so you have to figure out how they are put together.

@ OdesAngel -- I use seasoning...no dressing. Seasonings have one ingredient.

not necessarily true. Depends on whether you buy only whole seasonings and grind them yourself. A lot of seasonings actually contain fillers, and no they aren't listed on the label. Anything below a certain percentage does not have to be listed. So maybe you aren't eating as clean as you think.

When did I say that I eat this way? I said I consider clean eating. Read! I like my junk food too.

No one knows what "clean eating" is. Even the people who say they "eat clean" don't know what it is. It's all subjective.

Did your food fall on the ground and now it's covered in dirt? No. Guess what, your eating clean, lol.

I agree, I think it means different things to different people. to me, it would mean cutting-out M'n'M's, Snickers and Coke. I would focus more on tea, whole foods, veggies, lean meats, no bread or anything overly processed. but that's JMO.

I agree with most people that the definition is all over the place. So many foods are made in factories now that the definition of the word 'unprocessed' is also all over the place. I eat meat which is butchered and trimmed in factories, and not just ground meat either. The canned tomato is a good example too, because it's processed and cooked in a factory, but a staple in most cupboards. Pasta, rice, the croutons for my salad, butter/margarine, oil, stock cubes, salad dressings, nori, cheese, yogurt, basically everything with a barcode has come from a factory. Fruits and produce are mass-harvested and then washed in factories, and the ugly or oddly shaped fruits are taken out and used in other things or destroyed. Apples are waxed to be shiny and appealing to shoppers. I might be the first human to actually come into contact with most of the food I buy, beyond a glance by the quality-control staff at the factory. And I feel like I eat pretty well.

The all-natural-ingredient stuff isn't hand-made by people in kitchens with aprons on either, it's made in factories too. It's wonderful because it is convenient, we don't have to preserve our own vegetables or churn our own butter, and it is a lot cheaper than fresh, especially during the long winter months. So I think it does annoy most of us when people use 'clean' as a label for their food, because it does seem a lot like it is a label people give to themselves, purely to make themselves feel like they eat 'better' than the rest of us.