Why I stopped recommending 'clean eating' to clients

For years I used the phrase clean eating without noticing how much damage the framing did. Clients started treating entire food groups as contaminated, which produced more guilt-driven binges than the supposedly unclean foods ever caused on their own.

What replaced it in my practice: every food fits, some just fit more often than others. A cookie isn't dirty. It's a food with a certain calorie and nutrient profile that fits differently into a day than a bowl of oatmeal does. Neither framing is a moral one.

Clients who stopped labeling foods clean or dirty reported fewer binge episodes within a month, not because their diets changed dramatically, but because the food stopped being attached to a verdict about their character every time they ate it.

Part of the deeper dive: The Evidence-First Guide to Training, Eating, and Recovering Without the Hype.