How easy is it to give up ice-cream, cakes, bread, or even power bars? Although I’m already avoiding sugar laden foods, and the general ingredients of the Standard American Diet (S.A.D), giving up those last few cookies, candies and treats that pull my through the day will not be easy.

The clean eating life-style is certainly not a diet, it is a different way of looking at food and goes back to our foodie-roots: from scratch cooking using un-processed ingredients. In other words: healthy eating to a mild extreme. Clean eating can be summarized in just a sentence: if it’s processed or made in a factory, don’t eat it. Basically it calls for more culinary involvement in the food that goes into your body.

It goes without saying that this mode of living will avoid (ideally) all additives, preservatives, refined sugar, white flour and other processed ingredients found in our standard packaged foods.

What’s all this good for?

The benefits of clean eating are supposed to be pretty clear: avoiding processed food will help your body go back to processing food the way it was designed to do. Some believe that our diets have evolved faster than our bodies, and all those artificial additives and processing strip the nutritional value from our food, while our body no longer processes it as efficiently as it should. The result: weight gain, insulin resistance, and a range of other ailments.

Clean Eating as a cure?

Clean eating is a bit of a strange word-choice for this lifestyle, but it does somewhat describe the concept that you eat food that has not been processed and is therefore not ‘unclean’. Either way, the life style that clean eating promotes involves more room in your tummy for natural fibers, lean protein, whole grains and vitamins. With all those nutrients you are not supposed to be hungry, and eventually even stop missing the fat-laden ice creams you were wolfing down before. The going thought is that you will not just lose weight, but the entire body will function better. People reportedly see improvements in energy levels, body composition, rashes, headaches, and digestive problems.

I’ll be committing to a ‘cleaner’ diet, moving to a fully ‘clean eating’ regimen. I’ll chronicle how things are going, and will continue to post clean eating recipes.

To start: I am 5′7″, 157 lbs. I’ve got some abdominal flub, little time to exercise and tons of stress.