When it comes to dinner, it is actually pretty easy to stick to a clean eating lifestyle. This is when people tend to cook the most often, so as long as you are using whole, fresh ingredients, you should be fine. But here are a few dinner ideas to help get you started.
Chicken, Avocado, Bacon Salad
While just about any type of salad works great for a clean eating lifestyle, you do want to try to stick to salads that offer a little more protein during dinner. This should be a bigger meal than lunch, and one that is going to fill you up all night and cause you to become hungry again at midnight, or wake up completely starving. This salad is great because you can choose any greens you want, then have lots of protein with both chicken and bacon. The avocado is also filling, but gets you some healthy fats into the salad.
Protein, Veggies, and Rice
For a well-balanced meal while clean eating, choose a protein, vegetable, and carbohydrate or just double veggies. In this case, you want to go with rice but not just regular white steamed rice. It is better to go with a whole grain, brown rice, or even a grain like quinoa. You can choose any protein you like that fits the clean eating diet, such as grilled chicken, salmon, shrimp, or lean steak. Choose any types of veggies you like, whether you go with a classic steamed broccoli and cauliflower mix, sautéed carrots, or garlic green beans.
Turkey Chili
Chili is a wonderful thing to cook at home when you are following a clean eating lifestyle. It is easy to make and has a lot of room for flexibility. If you want to reduce the overall fat, you can use ground turkey instead of ground beef or ½ ground turkey and ½ ground beef to still have some of that beef flavor. You want to add your preferred beans, and course lots of veggies to reduce the overall amount of meat added to the chili. The seasonings are up to you and depending on how hot you like your chili. Serve it alone or with some hand-shredded cheese and reduced fat sour cream.
Stir-Fry
This is another simple dinner that can be filling and gives you room to make it your own. While you don’t want to use a lot of processed ingredients with a clean eating diet, if you just get a bag of frozen veggies, that should be okay. Just try to use fresh ingredients as much as possible. For stir-fry, all you need to do is sautee the veggies and serve it over some rice, quinoa, or couscous. If you go with rice or quinoa, make sure you get the actual bags of rice and cook it by boiling or using a rice cooker; avoid the boxes of instant rice or rice mixes, as they are processed and should be avoided. TO add more protein, cook up chicken, steak, or tofu with your stir-fry.
