We all know it’s healthier to “eat clean”—but convenient packaged foods, and weird ingredients seem to lurk everywhere. Just ask Megan Kimble. The Tucson-based food writer spent an entire year avoiding all processed foods, a daunting challenge she chronicles in her new book, Unprocessed ($16, amazon.com). 
 
 As a busy grad student living on an annual salary of $16,780, Kimble discovered creative and affordable ways to trade packaged staples for a real-food diet. It wasn’t easy, she told Health: “But I found that once I got going and formed new habits and figured out favorite meals, it became automatic.” That said, she doesn’t recommend going cold turkey. “Start small,” she said. “Try unprocessing one kind of food, see how it feels, and take it from there.” 
 
 Below, Kimble shares her eight best tips for eating cleaner. 
 
 RELATED: 4 Easy Clean-Eating Recipes 
 
 Read the label on everything you buy 
 
 “If the ingredient list contains a word you don’t really know, the food is probably processed,” Kimble advises. Think additives like modified food starch, soy lecithin, and xanthan gum, and added sugars and artificial sweeteners such as dextrose and high fructose corn syrup. Mustard, marinara sauce, and salad dressing are often surprising sources, she notes, adding, “Luckily these foods are easy—and cheaper!—to make at home.” 
 
 Pick up single-ingredient foods 
 
 Buying products with only one ingredient (like milk, oats, honey, and fruit) is the simplest way to avoid emulsifiers, preservatives, and other additives. Says Kimble: “These whole foods are 100 percent real.” 
 
 RELATED: 7 Tips for Eating Clean 
 
 Create versions of your favorite unprocessed treats 
 
 Rather than trying to conquer your cravings, satisfy them with healthier options. “I personally have a raging sweet tooth,” Kimble notes. “But instead of chocolate chip cookies, my former snack of choice, I’ll reach for a banana with almond butter, or some yogurt with honey and fruit.” Do you crave salty foods? Try homemade kale chips or roasted sweet potato fries. 
 
 Seek out brands you trust 
 
 “I carry Cherry Pie Larabars in my handbag in case of hunger emergencies: They’ve got nothing but dates, cherries, and almonds,” Kimble says. “You’ll start to recognize—and appreciate—food companies that don’t add wonky ingredients to their products. Another one of my favorite brands: Food for Life, which sells bread, tortillas, pasta, and cereal made with only whole, sprouted grains.” 
 
 RELATED: The Best Energy Bars 
 
 Join a CSA 
 
 “I found that Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs offer the best organic and local bang for your buck,” Kimble notes. “My produce conveniently comes with a newsletter featuring recipes that incorporate vegetables from that week’s box.” 
 
 Prepare food in bulk 
 
 It saves money and time, and ensures you have unprocessed options at the ready, Kimble says. Roast veggies at the beginning of the week, make a big batch of grains, cook dried beans in your crockpot, or keep cornmeal on hand for quick polenta. 
 
 RELATED: Eat More Veggies: 5 Easy Raw Food Recipes 
 
 When traveling, plan ahead 
 
 “I’ll map a route to the local natural food store when I’m away from home,” Kimble says. “Their prepared foods tend to be simpler, healthier, and cheaper than restaurant meals.” 
 
 Make deliberate exceptions 
 
 “During my year-long experiment, I learned how to make my own chocolate since I didn’t think I could survive a year without it,” Kimble admits. “But today, chocolate bars are a wonderfully convenient exception to my nearly unprocessed diet.” 
 
 RELATED: Why Milk Chocolate Might Be Good for Your Heart 

 TIME Health For more, visit TIME Health 
 
 We all know it’s healthier to “eat clean”—but convenient packaged foods, and weird ingredients seem to lurk everywhere. Just ask Megan Kimble. The Tucson-based food writer spent an entire year avoiding all processed foods, a daunting challenge she chronicles in her new book, Unprocessed ($16, amazon.com). 
 
 As a busy grad student living on an annual salary of $16,780, Kimble discovered creative and affordable ways to trade packaged staples for a real-food diet. It wasn’t easy, she told Health: “But I found that once I got going and formed new habits and figured out favorite meals, it became automatic.” That said, she doesn’t recommend going cold turkey. “Start small,” she said. “Try unprocessing one kind of food, see how it feels, and take it from there.” 
 
 Below, Kimble shares her eight best tips for eating cleaner. 
 
 Read the label on everything you buy 
 
 “If the ingredient list contains a word you don’t really know, the food is probably processed,” Kimble advises. Think additives like modified food starch, soy lecithin, and xanthan gum, and added sugars and artificial sweeteners such as dextrose and high fructose corn syrup. Mustard, marinara sauce, and salad dressing are often surprising sources, she notes, adding, “Luckily these foods are easy—and cheaper!—to make at home.” 
 
 Pick up single-ingredient foods 
 
 Buying products with only one ingredient (like milk, oats, honey, and fruit) is the simplest way to avoid emulsifiers, preservatives, and other additives. Says Kimble: “These whole foods are 100 percent real.” 
 
 Create versions of your favorite unprocessed treats 
 
 Rather than trying to conquer your cravings, satisfy them with healthier options. “I personally have a raging sweet tooth,” Kimble notes. “But instead of chocolate chip cookies, my former snack of choice, I’ll reach for a banana with almond butter, or some yogurt with honey and fruit.” Do you crave salty foods? Try homemade kale chips or roasted sweet potato fries. 
 
 Seek out brands you trust 
 
 “I carry Cherry Pie Larabars in my handbag in case of hunger emergencies: They’ve got nothing but dates, cherries, and almonds,” Kimble says. “You’ll start to recognize—and appreciate—food companies that don’t add wonky ingredients to their products. Another one of my favorite brands: Food for Life, which sells bread, tortillas, pasta, and cereal made with only whole, sprouted grains.” 
 
 Join a CSA 
 
 “I found that Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs offer the best organic and local bang for your buck,” Kimble notes. “My produce conveniently comes with a newsletter featuring recipes that incorporate vegetables from that week’s box.” 
 
 Prepare food in bulk 
 
 It saves money and time, and ensures you have unprocessed options at the ready, Kimble says. Roast veggies at the beginning of the week, make a big batch of grains, cook dried beans in your crockpot, or keep cornmeal on hand for quick polenta. 
 
 When traveling, plan ahead 
 
 “I’ll map a route to the local natural food store when I’m away from home,” Kimble says. “Their prepared foods tend to be simpler, healthier, and cheaper than restaurant meals.” 
 
 Make deliberate exceptions 
 
 “During my year-long experiment, I learned how to make my own chocolate since I didn’t think I could survive a year without it,” Kimble admits. “But today, chocolate bars are a wonderfully convenient exception to my nearly unprocessed diet.” 
 
 This article originally appeared on Health.com 
 
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 I wanted to like this book much more than I did. Or, perhaps, to be more accurate, I should say that it's not so much that I disliked the book as it is that it wasn't really what I'd hoped it would be. Let's just start by saying that it's a well-written book that's easy to read. The author is likeable, enough. There's nothing distasteful or irritating about it. That said, I felt a bit misled by the title. The bulk of the book is more about the processes that bring food to our tables, highly processed and otherwise. If you want to know things like what differentiates white flour from whole grain flour, how milk gets from the cow to your supermarket, how produce makes it from the fields to the supermarket, or how meat is butchered, then you will enjoy this book. But even though I did pick up some new information, I felt like I'd read much of this book before. Indeed, if you've read any Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman or the like, a lot of this information will not be new to you. 
 
 
 
 What I had really hoped for, based on the title, was more first-hand accounts of the experience of eating unprocessed for an entire year. Even for someone like me, whose food philosophy probably aligns pretty closely with the author's, I can't imagine doing this for a month let alone an entire year. I wanted to understand more about the challenges and practicalities of doing this, particularly on a limited budget. For example, did it take more time to cook than before she started the project? Seems like it must have. If yes, how did she find the extra time? What did she do after a long, hard day at work when the last thing she wanted to do was cook? Did she have any uncontrollable cravings for junk food? She says in the last chapter that she spent 27% of her income over the year on food. 

 On the morning of the first day I tried to give up processed foods, I sliced up organic strawberries and a banana, covered them with Greek yogurt, and added honey and flaxseed. Just as I was about to take my first bite, it occurred to me that the flaxseed in my cabinet was blueberry-flavored. A quick look at the label revealed that in addition to milled and roasted flaxseeds and blueberries, the package contained cornstarch, maltodextrin, cane sugar, natural flavors, and soy lecithin. 
 
 The second time I tried to go unprocessed, I learned just how hard it is to find chocolate without processed cane sugar or soy lecithin, an emulsifier extracted from soybean oil. I spent more time in the condiment aisle at the grocery store than I could ever have imagined, reading ingredient labels and wondering what on earth is natural flavor? (Psst: these 9 Common Foods Contain Toxic Ingredients.) 
 
 The third time I gave up processed food, however, it stuck. In January of 2012, I set myself a challenge: one year of unprocessed eating. The first question you might ask—besides “but why?” and I’ll get to that—is “what makes a food processed?” Cooking is a process, as is dicing, heating, fermenting, and preserving; indeed, many foods are processed and often they are better for it. But many times, they are not. For the purposes of my year, a food was unprocessed if I could theoretically make it in my own kitchen. I could grind wheat berries into flour, but, short of storming a chemistry lab, I couldn’t separate the wheat germ and bran from the endosperm. So no refined flour. If I wanted to make table sugar at home, I’d need a centrifuge, bleach, and a few de-clumping additives; honey required only figuring out how to collect the plant nectar that bees regurgitate onto honeycombs. I didn’t brew beer, but I theoretically could have; I gave up soda and bought myself a SodaStream for my bubbly fix. 
 
 Now for the why. There were environmental and economic reasons—by eating unprocessed, I hoped to situate my sustenance just a little closer to home, to keep my food dollars in my own community, where I hoped they might be visible, scalable, and accountable. And, of course, there was my health. Many of us know that we’re not eating as well as we could be—but it’s a confusing world out there, one where every new nutrition study seems to contradict the previous one. But the lesson to take from many of these studies is that whole food is better than fiddled-with food. And eating unprocessed food was an easy way to conceptualize eating healthier—it required only that I eat foods that were integral and intact. 
 
 While I had a few false starts, eating unprocessed soon became second nature—helped by the fact that, conveniently, real food tastes better than fake food. After my year of unprocessed eating ended, I gleefully returned to store-bought chocolate chip cookies and diet soda, only to find that they now tasted of chemicals and left my stomach unsatisfied and cranky. If, at the beginning of my year, everyone asked “what’s processed?” then at the end, they asked “how do you feel?” The answer: I felt stronger in mind and body. And mostly, I felt full. Before my year-long challenge began, I’d been dieting for over a decade. I had lost weight, but in the process I’d lost something in my relationship to food. And frankly, I’d been hungry too much of the time. But when I focused on unprocessed food I rarely felt hungry. After a food passed the “is it processed?” test, I let myself eat however much filled me up. I learned how to listen to my stomach. I ate a lot of delicious food, and I didn’t gain any weight. I thought about food a lot, but also, I thought about it way less—it became so much less fraught, so much more fun. (Fun is finding a food truck that sells unprocessed waffles.) 
 
 You don’t have to eat unprocessed for a year to reap the benefits. Try it for a day, a week, or a month. Start by reading the ingredient label on everything that ends up in your shopping cart. (Familiarize yourself with these 7 Crazy Food Additives You Probably Missed on the Nutrition Label.) Buy foods made of only one ingredient—oats, milk, honey—and combine them yourself at home: oatmeal! Consider joining a Community Supported Agriculture program—summer is the best season—for a great organic veggie bang-for-your-buck. Buy organic dairy, or locally raised meat, or additive-free tortillas. Cook—or find your equivalent of an unprocessed waffle food truck. You don’t have to do it all, or all at once. But you can start. 
 
 Megan Kimble’s is the author of Unprocessed: My City-Dwelling Year of Reclaiming Real Food.
– Eating healthy is no easy task. Case in point: Megan Kimble, a food writer in Tucson, tried going without processed food twice before it stuck on the third go-around. Now, as Health reports via Time, she's written a book called Unprocessed about how she went a year "unprocessed" on a salary of just $16,780. "Start small," she says. "Try unprocessing one kind of food, see how it feels, and take it from there." Among her other tips: Always read the label: "If the ingredient list contains a word you don’t really know, the food is probably processed," she says. That often includes unexpected foods like mustard and salad dressing, which she notes are "easy—and cheaper!—to make at home." Eat foods with one ingredient, like fruit, honey, oats, and milk. No additives, emulsifiers, or preservatives there. Indulge healthier: "I personally have a raging sweet tooth," she admits, but instead of chocolate chip cookies, she'll have almond butter on a banana. Find trustworthy brands like one of Kimble's favorites, Food for Life, "which sells bread, tortillas, pasta, and cereal made with only whole, sprouted grains," she says. Click for more of Kimble's advice, but meanwhile, what's the point of all this? In part it's to "keep my food dollars in my own community, where I hoped they might be visible, scalable, and accountable," she writes at Shape Magazine. "But the lesson to take from many ... studies is that whole food is better than fiddled-with food."