What does eating clean mean?
Eating healthy is a concept that seems to have been adopted widely by society at large in the last couple of years. For some reason, however, its definition is very blurry and unclear to the wide majority of people who think that eating healthy is the correct way to live life.
And, if you are anything like me, you are part of those confused people, but want to dig deeper into the fundamental concepts of nutrition (the 20% representing 80% of the fundamental knowledge in the field), in order to understand what eating clean may mean, and whether it is the appropriate long term strategy to nutrition when it comes to living a healthy, balanced existence, while training like an athlete.
Social media is a weird place, and the confirmation-bias-fueled algorithms put each of us in our own bubble of enclosed information we get exposed to. But one of the major trends the rise of social media has fostered has been health and fitness. A huge amount of interest has shifted on being healthy and having a beautiful-looking body, a general desire likely enhanced by the seemingly crucial importance of showing to the world how we look and how high in the social hierarchy we are located. While the fight for social status in the societal hierarchy might be a clear example of elephant in the brain, the bandwagon effect around eating healthy is likely a by-product of the explosion in the relevance of health and fitness in the current (Western) culture.
In the culture at large, there seems to be a commonly accepted definition of eating clean, although very faded and fragmented: healthy eating is generally associated with a nutrition regimen mostly composed of raw food and vegetables, and more in general to food which is as least processed as possible. While this is a valid point and, generally speaking, a sound guideline for choosing the type of food to include in your diet, it does not take into account the big picture and the fundamental concepts of nutrition, which are key determinants of a healthy diet (where healthy means balanced in calories and nutrients, with a mindful approach to it, and without over obsession on food choices).
In the fitness world, where diet plays a pivotal role in performance as well as aesthetic outcomes, the idea of only eating healthy (as per the general definition of the term — i.e. minimally-processed, natural, raw food) is a bit of a controversial one, especially in the last decade, when significant scientific progress has been made in the discovery of the '20% that generates 80% of the results in a diet, with many new eating regimens brought to awareness (nutrition approaches such as IIFYM, Flexible Dieting, Intuitive Eating), many of which are based on fulfilling the required amount of calories and appropriate macronutrients by the end of the day, without overstressing about it.
Some Fundamental Concepts
Is it actually necessary to eat blend, untasteful, boring food in order to eat healthily? Probably not. There are some very key concepts to consider when it comes to nutrition, before judging any food as good or bad per se.
Calories
The first on the list of the most relevant concepts behind nutrition is calories. Calories are the bedrock of every food. They are the objective indicator of the energy a certain comestible provides our body with. As much as many do not like this, calories are the real catalyst of weight maintenance, weight gain, and weight loss. This is because the more calories we ingest above our TDEE, the more weight will be gained rapidly. TDEE stands for total daily energy expenditure, and it is the measure of how many calories we need in order to maintain our current weight. One of the most accurate measures of TDEE seems to be the Mifflin-St Jeor equation, although mostly considered just a solid starting point, to be paired with old-fashioned trial and error, crucial in allowing us to gauge more precisely our TDEE. So, the TDEE is what determines the amount of calories you need to eat in order to lose weight (calories in < TDEE), maintain weight (calories in = TDEE), or gain weight (calories in > TDEE —one reason for which one would want to gain weight is to build muscle mass).
So, once this first nutrition foundation is laid out in front of me, I am now beginning to question the general-population definition of healthy eating and clean food, particularly due to the fact that it (generally) does not account for the amount of calories one should eat in order to eat healthily. This is a great fallacy because every food has got calories, and too many calories, no matter where they come from, lead to uncontrolled weight gain (if there is no mindfulness as for the quantity of food eaten). Our body does not seem to care about whether the calories we ingest (given the same amount) come from chicken, broccoli, and rice, or ice cream. However, there is a difference among those choices: their nutrient composition, and, firstly, their macronutrient composition.
Macronutrients
In the nutrition hierarchy, macronutrients occupy the second place of importance. These are protein, carbohydrates, and fats (each of them can be broken down into subcategories — e.g. fats are divided into saturated, monounsaturated, polyunsaturated, trans fats).
While calories are the very foundation from where to begin the exploration of the nutrition world, a balanced macronutrient partitioning plays a key role, particularly for our body composition.
So, the second step which characterizes the process of following a balanced, healthy eating regimen is to figure out how to split the calorie goal set in the TDEE calculation phase into protein, fats, carbohydrates. Although there are various approaches to macronutrient partitioning (i.e. the distribution of macronutrients —e.g. the ketogenic diet emphasizes fats over carbs), a healthy nutritional intake seems to be characterized by a balanced distribution of macronutrients, as the term healthy embodies balance and long-term consistency. When choosing your macronutrients intakes, therefore, you start from setting the quantity of protein you are going to eat on a daily basis (generally speaking in the range of 1.2 to 2 grams per kg of body weight), then fats (at least 1 gram per kg of bodyweight — fats provide 9kcal/gram), and you lastly allocate the remaining amount of calories to be consumed (based on your TDEE and goal) on carbohydrates.
The process of nutrient partitioning brings awareness on what a daily healthy diet should look like, quantitatively. Protein is the most important macronutrient when it comes to building or maintaining lean muscle tissue, and its quantity depends on your athletic state (whether you exercise regularly, and what your goals are), as well as experience level (beginner athletes will need less protein to construct muscle mass, whereas more advanced trainees will need more).
So, it seems that the second defining characteristic of a healthy diet is to be found in its balanced macronutrient partitioning, which does not exclude any type of food, nor creates friction in the social, daily lives of individuals. But it provides clear numerical boundaries in terms of food consumption, in order to keep a healthy weight and lifestyle.
Micronutrients
The last element in the nutrition hierarchy is micronutrients. These are vitamins and minerals which can be found in most fruits and vegetables. Including micronutrients in the nutrition regimen is, in my perception, another crucial element in the definition of a healthy diet, which must not overshadow calories and macronutrients, however. Micronutrients consumption, in fact, comes as a sort of knock-on effect if we eat the right amount of calories and make food choices which account in large quantity for vegetables and fruit.
This whole nutrition hierarchy setup makes you more clear on what really matters in what we consume, what is the minority of causes that provide the majority of the results in living a healthy, balanced existence. But I find that there is another fundamental idea that must be internalized in order to eat healthily: nutrition is a long-term game, and it is a set of games. Not differently from when you tell your child that losing a football match is not a big deal because there is a whole season to face, the nutrition game is a long-term one, and you probably want to commit to it for the long run, in order to live healthily. It requires the internalization of a vision, an understanding that it does not have to feel miserable, to stick to eating healthy.
To sum up, eating healthy encompasses a broader approach to eating than what we tend to think, in which food is not seen as an enemy, but rather a set of nutrients and calories. It requires a long term view of nutrition, in which short term and long term objectives are harmoniously co-existent within an enjoyable food intake that does not exclude any particular category, takes into account calories, macronutrients, and micronutrients consumption, and naturally prefers foods that are rich in protein, healthy fats (as in mostly unsaturated), and micronutrients (vitamins and minerals), without excluding completely processed food, but mindfully reducing its consumption and including it within the calories-macronutrient-micronutrient framework of reference for healthy eating.
This is the 20% that brings 80% of the results. More relevantly, this is the 20% that empowers you to see nutrition as a holistic, non-black-and-white, integrative part of your existence, and just another game to play.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES