The Cost of Not Eating Clean
If you are one of those people who loves to cook or who can think of a meal to prepare at the drop of a dime, oh how I envy you. I neither like to cook nor can I ever think of meals to prepare. That is a bad combination for anyone who desires to make sure to eat healthy or clean. Not only that, eating out or on the go consistently can be costly both financially and physically.
I know all about costly. I recently spent 10 dollars on a dish for lunch called Southwestern Quinoa. It was made to order with a chili-like sauce, kale, green and yellow peppers, kidney beans, chicken, corn, and as the same states, quinoa. Not only was that meal expensive, it tasted horrible!! Yes, it was clean (the jury is still out on the corn), but it was a dish full of soggy badness.
Those of you who love to cook can avoid such misfortunate episodes. For some of you in this group, your issue is not the lack of a desire to cook or knowing what to cook. Your problem is that what you do cook is a far cry from being considered clean. You may, in fact, be gaining more than you are losing because of what you cook.
Access to Clean Recipes
I have come up with a solution for all of us. I took to Google in search of clean healthy recipes. In this post you are only a click away from healthy clean meals. If you are like me and cannot come up with meals to cook to save your life, I have you covered. Yes, we still need to cook even though we do not like to, but I think we will be ok. Those of you who love to cook but have been struggling to keep your meals clean, no worries, you are in good hands too.
There are A LOT of sites dedicated to recipes across the internet. I narrowed that large list to recipes dedicated to clean eating. I then pared that large list down to four recipe sites. Each of these sites are authored by women who are passionate about and dedicated to living a healthy lifestyle. At least three of the four authors have lost weight. Their websites are current. Lastly their three of the four sites include nutritional information with the recipes. It was my goal to make this process easy for you, as well as informative.
I am no expert on clean eating, but I suspect form a clean eating purest perspective some of these meals are not 100% clean. I am not aiming for 100%. I simply care about us eating healthier and having easy access to recipes that will help us to that. Between these four women you have well of 100 plus recipes. Pick a recipe, hit the grocery store, and have some fun with your clean meals. Happy cooking!
Chelle Stafford: Recipe for Fitness – Lost 80 pounds and has kept the weight off. Her blog is called Recipe for Fitness. She breaks her recipes up by categories (breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.) which will make it easy for you to find and configure meals. Chelle even includes icons to let you know if the meals are gluten free and/of dairy free.
Monique Volz: Ambitious Kitchen – Monique got her passion for cooking from her parents. That gene did not come down to me from my mother. Hence why I have to search the web for meal ideas. Monique provides all kinds of meal categories. There are too many to list here. Besides, she already lists the categories on her site, Ambitious Kitchen. Be sure to also check out her Healthy Living page.
Kelly Hunt : Eat Yourself Skinny – Your goal does not have to be to eat yourself skinny. What I hope you appreciate from Kelly's blog, Eat Yourself Skinny is, like me, she does not like diets (awesome Kelly!!). She aims for her food to be healthy while not tasting like cardboard or shoe leather. She does not have that on her site, but I know what is what people think of when they think of eating healthy. As of this writing, on the right panel of her page she lists recipes by category.
Lisa Leake: 100 Days of Real Food – Lisa is an author and blogger. Her blog is dedicated to cutting out processed food. She does not reference her information as clean eating, at least not that I saw, but she is pretty dang close to clean to me. That is why I include her here. I also include her because I have her cookbook, 100 Days of Real Food. I made the waffles for friends. I managed not to poison them and they told me they taste good. Lisa offers two ways to access recipes, well three if you include the search box. The other two ways are by a recipe (name) index and the other is by category. Not included with her recipes is the nutritional information. You can use MyFitnessPal or Fooducate to get that information.
Have a Clean Thanksgiving
Lisa Leake recently added to her blog a post called How to Have a Real Food Thanksgiving. This is a great place to start revamping your Thanksgiving to something healthier.
Start the Discussion: How will you clean up your cooking to make it healthier? Start the discussion in the post comments, on Facebook or Twitter.