5 Mindset Shifts To Make Clean Eating A Habit

To celebrate Clean Eating Week here at mindbodygreen we're sharing the many ways that wellness experts fuel and care for their bodies with food.

Functional medicine nutritionist Dana James shares how she helps her clients shift their mindset to create healthier eating patterns. For more great tips from Dana, check out her video course, How to Ditch Sugar.

Food is medicine, and your mind is the cure.

As a functional medicine nutritionist and cognitive behavioral therapist, I’m privy to the inner workings of a client’s mind and behavior around food.

What trips them up from consistently following a clean diet is not lack of willpower but rather a reflexive action to use food as a distraction, a reward, or to placate an emotion.

They might struggle at social events to say no to food for fear of being perceived as a diva. Or their own kitchen may lure them under the falsehood that a cookie is needed for signing off the day. It’s these beliefs (and others) that need to be dismantled if they want the vitality, clarity, and radiance that comes from consistently eating a clean diet.

Food is neither good nor bad, but it is effective or ineffective.

You can only change patterns if you’re aware of them. Many of us sleepwalk through life, creating unintentional rituals that don’t support our well-being, from snoozing instead of meditating, from watching HBO instead of sleeping, and from eating when we’re bored as opposed to investigating why we’re bored.

Just because you heard a voice that said you were tired, hungry, or upset doesn’t mean you need to eat. Very often the signals have been crossed and you’ll hear tired means food, hungry means food, and upset means food. This is the reptilian brain at work.

But you also have a neocortex and this is where your consciousness resides. If you pause, this allows time for you to connect with your consciousness to ask, “Is food the right response?” Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.

Perfection is for the Gods, not humans. We’re not wired to be perfect, and if we expect ourselves to be, we'll enslave ourselves. Give yourself permission to eat something for pleasure once a week.

You don’t need to plan your foods for days in advance to be successful. Your next meal (or snack) will suffice. When you’re picking up lunch, get your afternoon snack as well. If you’re standing in line for your morning coffee, get a green juice as a midmorning snack. Starbucks carries bottled green juice now, so phytonutrient-rich juices are on almost every street corner.