Too many diet plans today focus on what you should not be eating instead of what you should put in your mouth. Healthy eating plans should be constructed not of prepackaged, preprocessed pseudo-food; instead they should teach people how to make good food selections from the plentiful real food currently available.

What makes food real?
It is unfortunate that so many people are unaware of what real food actually is.  It is the result of a food industry gone very wrong.  You would be hard pressed to find much real food at your average supermarket.  Although the items found in the produce aisle and the meat aisle are fairly close, they are still laden with pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones and who knows what else?

Real food, good food that truly nourishes you, doesn't come in convenient portion-sized boxes.  It comes from organic farmers and ranchers that keep their herds out on the grasslands.  Real food doesn't mean boring food either; it means food that is as close to its natural state as it can be.

Why not commercial food?
If you knew some of the things that are done in the name of higher yields and quicker turn around to market, you would probably never touch food again.  Crops have been specifically tailored to be more receptive to specific pesticides so that farmers can mass spray their fields.  Meat animals are raised in small, enclosed grain yards where disease is rampant and hormones and antibiotics are routinely given to speed up production.

Even fish, once touted as about the healthiest option, when farmed, loses much of its nutritional value.  The healthy omega 3 fatty acids are replaced with less beneficial omega 6 fatty acids, and our diet is already too high in those.  The exact opposite is true of wild caught fish, by the way.

Refining Food is Harmful
We didn't start refining our foods until the Industrial Revolution took over the planet.  Until that point, people ate foods in their most natural state.  Food is refined to increase its shelf life.

The process involves removing most of the natural nutrients for storage, and then spraying on those essential nutrients, in chemical form when the ingredient is to be used.  No amount of spray on nutrition is as good as the real thing.

There may be no connection but obesity, heart disease, diabetes and a number of other diseases start to increase at the same point in history when we turn from real food to refined foods.

Build a healthy meal plan
To build healthy meal plans, you should plan to take some time and change over the staples you have in your kitchen one by one.  Making the transition wholesale is not only expensive, it requires a huge change in eating style and can be difficult to maintain.

Start by purchasing those grass fed meats that you love, but rarely get.  You don't need more than 4-6 ounces of protein to feel sated, so enjoy the good stuff.  Replace grains as they get used up with organic products such as quinoa, brown rice, teff and steel cut oats.  Dump the dairy completely until you find a source of reliable organic, raw milk products, and use them sparingly.  Finally, eliminate all those artificial ingredients and sweeteners and keep only olive oil and coconut oil in your pantry.

Remember, the transition will take time, but you will start to feel and look better almost immediately once you find one of the healthy eating plans that work for you.