28 Day Clean Eating Challenge Meal Plan – Year after year, “diet and healthy eating” tops the list of most common New Year’s resolutions for Americans. But this healthy eating challenge is different from the others you might see in January. We’re not here to tell you to follow a specific diet plan, and we’re never going to focus on nutrition for a specific body type. Instead, we want to help you choose whole foods over processed foods and make it super easy so you can continue year-round.
Why Simply put, it’s one of the few “golden rules” of healthy eating that experts can agree on, whether they’re Paleo, Keto, or Mediterranean. And it’s something that can be adapted to almost any way of eating, regardless of a person’s unique nutritional or dietary needs.
28 Day Clean Eating Challenge Meal Plan
But it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew when working toward a new goal, no matter how excited you feel on January 1st. Because it takes 28 days to form a habit, we’ve created our food challenge to give you actionable advice every day for the next four weeks to encourage you to eat more whole foods while meeting your personal healthy eating goals.
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Ready to join us for four weeks of shifts? Everything will start on January 5. Read the plans, subscribe to our newsletter* (in the box below) and sync the plan with your calendar. Your healthy eating goals are so close you can taste them.
Think about what healthy eating habits you want to change or implement in your life today and write them down. As mentioned, we encourage everyone to eat more whole foods and less processed foods, but what does that look like for
Brigitte Zeitlin, MPH, RD, CDN and founder of BZ Nutrition in New York City, recommends paring down your broader goals to something more specific that you can “quantify and measure” to stay accountable. “For example, you might say you never skip breakfast, which is something small that you can count and quantify. This is a change that will have a huge impact,” she says.
It’s also important to focus your goals on behaviors rather than specific foods to avoid restrictive thinking, says Alissa Rumsey, MS, RD, owner of Alissa Rumsey Nutrition and Wellness, a virtual private practice specializing in intuitive eating. “I recommend asking yourself: Do I expect this resolution to change my body? Am I just removing things from my life or adding to them? Am I trying to change a behavior or an outcome?” How you respond can help you understand whether or not a potential target is coming from a healthy place.
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You should also think about your lifestyle and how your eating patterns fit into it. “The point is to keep those habits going for the whole 12 months,” Zeitlin says; if you set goals for yourself that don’t match your real desire to live, you most likely won’t be able to stick to them. For example, if you like to eat out with friends often, it is probably impossible to say that you will cook every meal for yourself. But if you decide you want to cook at least one meal a day, it still gives you some flexibility to spend time with friends without changing your life.
Zeitlin suggests spending an entire week, including the weekend, tracking what you eat and drink to get a more holistic picture of your typical eating habits. You don’t need to track calories, portion sizes, or macros — Zeitlin says just writing down what you ate and drank and the time of day you ate it is enough. Exception: drinks. “We want to know if you’re drinking eight glasses of water or if you’re drinking eight glasses of wine,” she says.
Why start a food journal? Having a clearer picture of your current eating habits will make it easier to set goals that are right for you and your needs, which can help you adjust or revise the goals you set on Day 1.
It’s now widely accepted that excess sugar is a major risk factor for inflammation, diabetes, and heart disease, but it’s still a large part of most people’s diets. According to the American Heart Association, adult women should eat no more than 25 grams (about six teaspoons) of added sugar per day, but most of us consume about three times that amount.
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That’s why, as part of your food diary, Zeitlin says it’s a good idea to track all of your sugar sources, from the healthy (fruits and grains) to the more decadent, and assess where your sugar is coming from on a given day or week. Then change your eating habits so that your sugar intake reaches recommended levels—without cutting back
“If you want your total sugar intake for the day to come from something sweet, all you have to do is be aware of yourself,” says Zeitlin. “Then we work in the opposite direction. You eat one ounce of dark chocolate every night after dinner, great. Then for the rest of the day, make sure you eat no more than two cups of fruit a day and no more than two cups of grains a day.” By approaching it this way, you leave room for dessert while keeping your overall sugar levels in check.
Of course, healthy eating starts with what’s in your fridge and kitchen. Often what we have on hand in our own environment helps inform the food choices we make. “If your pantry and fridge are full of healthy, easy foods, you’ll be much less likely to fail,” Kimberly Snyder, CN, previously told Well+Good.
Take a look at what products are currently on your shelves today and look for patterns. How much is fresh compared to packaged? How many plants are there? What part of it qualifies as processed? Pay attention to this and try to reduce the consumption of processed foods and replace them with fresh or minimally processed ones. Avoid foods that have expired or contain artificial preservatives, artificial sweeteners, or high fructose corn syrup.
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Now that you’ve seen which parts of your kitchen need replenishing, it’s time to head to the grocery store to load up on new supplies. Some general things to keep in mind when shopping for healthy food are: buy what’s in season, choose minimally processed foods with a short list of ingredients, and only buy what you actually plan to cook. “There’s nothing more exhausting than buying a whole bunch of fresh vegetables and then throwing them away when you can’t cook them all before they go bad,” says Zeitlin. She encourages everyone to make a list of exactly what they’re going to cook and stick to it at the grocery store.
Some of Zeitlin’s favorite foods that she always has in her kitchen are almond butter, tomato sauce, olive oil, parmesan cheese, spinach, blueberries or other types of fruit, and dark chocolate.
Take a small step toward eating more whole foods today and eat foods you’ve never eaten before. Bonus points if it’s in season!
Healthy eating is more than what you eat; this also applies to your attitude towards food. “Having a good relationship with food means that food has no moral code,” says Zeitlin. However, for many people, food choices are often complicated by feelings of guilt or shame, which can have a detrimental effect on our psyche. “Categorizing food as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ can cause certain mental limitations, where we feel bad after eating a ‘bad food’ and then tell ourselves we’ll never eat that way again,” Ramsey says. . This can lead to a cycle of restricting food, then overeating that food, then feeling guilty about overindulging and working on the restriction again — a cycle that’s unhealthy for physical and mental health, she says.
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Neutralizing your inner dialogue can take time and practice, Ramsey says. Start today (and continue to do so every day) by actively questioning and challenging your thoughts about food. For example, if you think you “shouldn’t” be eating something, ask yourself why. Is it because you think the food is “bad” or because you really don’t want to eat it? If it’s the former, let go of the judgmental thoughts, eat the food, and pay attention to how you feel afterward (and, you guessed it, record it in your food journal).
Research shows that people who regularly eat at least 30 different types of plants, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, grains and herbs, have the healthiest guts. Boost your own gut health by committing to eating 30 different plant-based foods this week. The number seems daunting, but remember that this applies not only to fruits and vegetables. If you add some chia seeds and berries to your yogurt in the morning,
