It seems that in the world of weight loss the idea of clean eating has caught on, but there are still lots of people that think losing weight is all about being hungry and restricting food. When comparing clean eating vs. calorie counting, healthy food comes out on top considering both effectiveness and difficulty.

Even if you already know that good nutrition is the way to reach your goals but are still having a hard time dedicating to it, this article will help you gain confidence in changing your diet so you can start burning fat the healthy way.

When I started embracing a healthy diet, I saw people around me losing weight the hard way, and I started to feel bad because they were suffering through hunger and over exercising with little results while I was burning through fat really fast with a smile on my face.

People always ask, “how do you do it?,” and when I reply simply, “I eat healthy,” it never seems to click for them. If most people really knew how much weight they could lose by eating clean, the idea of changing their eating habits might be much more exciting.

We all want something like calorie counting to hold onto… something that will definitively show our success at the end of each day… but calories don’t address the major issue with most overweight people which is not simply overeating, but bad diet content.

Don’t get me wrong, calories are a very real thing and counting them can be very useful for getting a general idea of whether you are overeating or not, but calories only tell a small part of the story, and when focused on as the only part of your diet will lead to hunger, and struggle.

But don’t let this discourage you! All you have to do to lose healthy weight is believe in the power of clean eating for weight loss so that you can take action with confidence, and watch the pounds melt away faster than you could have hoped for without ever needing to go hungry.

When I lost 80 pounds I focused on adding healthy foods into my diet one step at a time, rather than struggling to cut food out of my diet.

Clean Eating vs. Calorie Counting- Why food restriction alone is not enough

I‘m certainly not saying that you can’t lose weight by only eating less… lots of people do it and I’ve done it too.

But take it from me, that the idea that your body will burn fat if you give it less energy than it uses… is a technically true statement that is overly simplistic.

When food restriction is the only thing focused on as the part of a diet, it often leads to muscle loss, hunger, stress, and dieting failure.

When I was in high school I was fairly chubby, not nearly as big as I got after graduating but still pretty big. I was 15 years old and weighed 188 pounds, and wanted to lose weight very badly (as I always had).

Like so many others I had always believed that I was a victim of my metabolism, a natural tendency to gain fat, and thought that I was overeating because a lack of control. I thought that hunger and extreme exercise were what was needed to have a healthy body.

I put myself on a 1200 calories diet (2000 for days I worked out), and by the time I was in my second year of high school I weighed 142 pounds. For the first time in my life I actually lost a significant amount of weight, which felt great at the time but took a huge toll on my body and was not sustainable since I never actually changed my poor diet content.

I generally understood that if I skipped a soda I could have a bowl of cereal as they were similar in calories, but I was clueless (and also careless to be fair) about what good nutrition could do for me, and what bad nutrition combined with a low-calorie diet was doing to my body.

The weight loss was real, but so was the muscle loss, fatigue, and constant feeling of hunger I had to endure to achieve weight loss at the time. I stopped restricting my food intake for the rest of high school, but still took weight lifting classes at school so stayed in good shape until I graduated at 165 pounds.

But after I stopped working out and kept eating packaged food, eating too much fast food, junk, and drinking soda all day… the same problem that had been present since I was a kid perpetuated itself and I gained 80 pounds, hitting 245 at my heaviest in my mid-twenties.

Sure, some people naturally gain fat easier than others, but this doesn’t change the fact that the problem is the food we are surrounded by and make the majority of our meals out of every day.

We look at our friends who are lean and strong and eat whatever they want, and then turn the blame on ourselves rather than our diet since we have similar eating habits to them.

We simply must eat more than our friends, right? It may be true to some extent, but the pure and simple fact is that a healthy diet will change everything for you.

What happens when you restrict food and don’t improve your diet?

So, before we get into talking about healthy food, let’s talk about what actually happens when you go hungry when trying to diet.

Although you might lose weight by simply aiming for under 2000 calories, here’s what may happen when those calories are filled with the wrong content…

There is a simplistic point that I like to make about calorie counting, simply for the sake of showing that calories alone are not enough to give us the energy we need.

The fact is that you could easily consume your total daily calories in one milk shake, and get almost none of the nutrients that your body needs to function properly. I make this overly simplistic point to give a little perspective and to bring up the point that with a bad diet you could consume far more than 2000 calories per day, gain fat, and still feel like you are starving.

This is exactly why so many people are overeating even though their diet is high in calories, and why food restriction so often fails as a dieting technique. We are starving for nutrients.

Yes, unhealthy food is delicious, but your cravings for junk will naturally reduce when you fill up on healthy food.

This is yet another reason I try to focus on “more”, on adding healthy things into my life rather than endlessly struggling with the notion of cutting things out.

When you bring good things in, there will simply be less room for the bad stuff and junk will become less important to you as you change your habits and also see your progress in the mirror.

If someone with an average American diet simply eats less of the same stuff they are already eating, they may lose some weight but it will be very difficult both because of ongoing hunger for good nutrients, and also because there are still a large amount of bad nutrients present in the food they are eating that are easy to be stored as fat, and also hinder the whole fat burning process regardless of calories.

Hunger and struggling to lose fat aren’t the only things that are bad about going hungry either…

It’s no joke when people say that you lose muscle when restricting food. When they say that they aren’t just talking about getting smaller gains in the gym… they are talking about the difference between either uncovering the muscle underneath your fat as you get thin, or wasting away both your fat and your muscle alike.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “skinny fat,” and it’s a very real thing. That’s exactly what happened to me in high school when I dropped from 188 to 142 by going hungry, I wasted away.

Yet another negative aspect of losing weight by food restriction is that it is not sustainable. Not only is eating a diet of healthy whole foods the key to reaching your weight goals now, but is truly the answer to solving the problem long term.

You can only go hungry for so long before it gets to you in one way or another, but natural food can and should become a part of your normal lifestyle so that you can keep the weight off indefinitely and without struggle.

So enough about the wrong way… let’s talk about the power of clean eating, and how healthy food is the best option for weight loss.

How can you lose weight without ever being hungry or counting calories?

If you are like me, you have to know how something works to really have the confidence to give it your best.

After some time, I finally came to believe that a healthy diet was the answer to my weight issues, which was a big step above thinking I had to be hungry and count calories all of the time.

But I didn’t really understand the idea enough at the time, to know how big of a difference healthy eating could make.

But when it finally clicked for me, it felt like I was cheating.

All of the sudden I understood that almost everything unhealthy that I was eating and drinking at the time, gave me an opportunity to make a replacement and to lose weight even faster.

Once I understood what was happening beyond the calories when I traded a snack cake for a piece of fruit… or a soda for a glass of water… making healthy decisions and replacements was much easier to do.

I started by replacing one to two meals per day with something healthy, and ate whatever I wanted for the rest of the day.

I wasn’t worried about calories anymore, and I didn’t feel the pressure to be perfect… because I was losing fat quickly already, and I knew that I was developing habits that would build over time, and that I would need to last forever.

All it took was that first leap of faith and a few weeks of healthier eating to see that I was doing the right thing.

Replacing even a fraction of my diet from junk to whole and natural food started to make a huge difference in my weight right away.

I could literally see myself changing in the mirror every 1 to 3 days, and also saw the scale dropping more quickly than it ever did when I had restricted food. I weigh myself less than once per week, because the mirror is much more reliable to me, but I can say that in the beginning of my journey after making a significant change in my diet, I was sometimes losing up to half a pound per day.

Eventually I lost 80 pounds, having simply focused on eating more healthy foods, and exercising a few times per week to get better and faster results.

There has never been any need for me to reduce the food I intake because there is still so far to go as far as improvement is concerned.

Even though it truly brings me pride to say that my diet is quite healthy, there is still much room for improvement which makes me feel empowered to reach new levels of fitness. Why would I eat LESS when my diet could still be a few times healthier than it already is?

Check out this article to learn more about the foods that made me fat, and the foods that made me thin.

What happens when you replace junk with healthy food?

Okay so it’s not as simple as calories consumed and calories burned… so what’s the key to burning fat? More specifically how does healthy food facilitate this process?

Natural food is packed with the nutrients that we need, but much lower in calories and bad nutrients that cause weight gain/ prevent weight loss.

It’s really not so complicated when you think about it. It’s all about a ratio calories and useful nutrients. Our typical diets are high in bad nutrients, and low in the good ones.

When we make a big change in what we are eating… going from packaged meals, fast food, and other junk, to a diet with much more whole, natural, and unprocessed food, we get all the energy we could want while allowing our body to stay in a fat burning environment.

Unhealthy food is high in calories (and insulin-spiking chemicals), and also low in satisfying nutrients… which means that it makes you gain weight fast and it’s very hard to get full / very easy to overeat.

However, natural and healthy food does just the opposite. Healthy foods are low in calories compared to how many satisfying nutrients that they contain, which means that they fill you up fast, while leaving your body in a calorie deficit… which means losing weight without being hungry!

Almost all of the food that you need to lose lots of weight can be found by shopping on the outer edges of a grocery store. Fill your diet with as much vegetables, fruits, lean meat, and whole grains as you can. Other healthy items you’ll find on the edges of a grocery store are non-fat Greek yogurt, and eggs.

Here are 5 very effective and familiar weight loss foods that you can start eating today to lose weight…

And here are 8 healthy snacks that you can take to work to lose weight.

If you want to start a diet that helps you change your diet and lose weight step by step, the 8-Week Weight Loss Challenge is an amazing place to start your weight loss journey! It will lead you to a life filled with healthy food and habits, one week at a time.