Clean(ish) summary

There’s no point in sugarcoating it: our relationship with food has become fraught. Choosing food has become kind of like a second job. It’s a mathematical task, and even an obsession to some: counting calories! It can be a fun little challenge trying to pronounce all the ingredients listed on your bag of chips.

But when you’re bombarded by articles decrying the obesity epidemic and social-media posts showing us all these idealized versions of perfect meals and bodies, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed.

Most importantly, be sure to practice compassion with yourself as you try to make these changes. It’s a hard thing to feel like you’re getting right, and an impossible thing to feel like you’re getting perfect – and informing yourself is a step in the right direction. With that in mind, let’s step outside for a minute. Outside our bodies. 

Being clean is largely about what we eat. But what we absorb also plays a role – what we breathe in, what we put on our skin, what we surround ourselves with. Along with the good and the harmless things, we also absorb hormone disruptors, respiratory toxins, development toxins, and carcinogens. 

First, a little history lesson. As part of the New Deal after the Great Depression, crops like corn, wheat and soybeans were heavily subsidized by the American government. Obviously, that led farmers to focus more on these crops, so they came to occupy a huge share of farm production overall, which means they’re in just about every commercially produced food.

 Then add in the fact that only about 15 big companies control most commercial food production.

What is the best way to eat? 

In the early 1900s, all these scientists and researchers were studying the diets and health of remote populations around the world. And they noticed that those who did not eat a Western diet had fewer cases of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, cancer – all these scourges of the modern world. They even had better teeth! 

Now that we’ve talked about all the toxins floating in and around us every day, let’s get to the magical ways that our body naturally deals with them.

Think of your body as The Avengers, a group of superheroes fighting against toxins – both the ones in- and outside of our bodies. 

Now that we know what to eat, let’s take a quick look at how to eat. Gin Stephens is a huge advocate of intermittent fasting. 

You’ve probably heard of intermittent fasting. In case you haven’t, you basically set a time window for the hours that you can eat in. Most people go 16 hours without eating, so, for example, you could eat breakfast at 11 a.m. and stop eating by 7 p.m. Outside of those times, you limit yourself to water, black coffee, or plain tea.