Clean Eating 5-Day Quickstart Guide

Hey, thanks for checking out our Clean Eating 5-Day Quickstart guide.  If you’re new to our site, I want to welcome you and let you know what we’re about

At 90/10 Nutrition, we really have a passion for a few things:

1. Eating amazing food
2. Not feeling deprived and hungry all of the time
3. Staying healthy and fit
4. Helping others do 1-3 at the same time

If you follow this quickstart guide, you’ll see that the first 3 are possible.  We just believe that life is better without calorie counting and processed food and we think you’ll agree.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our whole system works, you can get a 3 week free trial (no credit card required) RIGHT HERE.

Below you will find a complete guide to your first 5 days of clean eating.  There is a section on daily tasks, how to make modifications, what to do about beverages and condiments, and overviews of each meal.

If you are a member, additional resources are available including a full electronic version of the meal plan (so you can modify it to your tastes) and a modifiable shopping list generator.  If you aren’t a member and want these resources, just do the free trial and you’ll get access right away.

The whole 90/10 system is based on eating 10% or less of your intake from the yellow tier, 90% or more from the green tier, and nothing from the red tier (except maybe special planned occasions).  So, make sure you calculate your 10%.  

NOTE:  The 5 day plan below will easily keep you inside your 10%, but you should know the number anyway.

All of the meals in the 5-day meal plan are laid out for you, but if you make any modifications or eat anything in addition to the plan, you’ll need the tiers so you know what you should eat.  There are pdf versions and online versions.  You should save or print the pdf versions and bookmark the online versions for easy access.

In addition to the meals in the 5-day meal plan, you should be doing the following things on a daily basis to achieve the best results.

While we don’t require any specific water intake to go along with this plan, we do recommend you drink plenty of plain water. You may have seen recommendations for drinking water based on your body weight in other programs.  We’ve never really held to any of those as necessary.  As a general rule of thumb, 8 cups of water (64 oz) is a great target for most people.  It’s both reasonable to achieve and adequate for most people.  Of course, if you have a physically strenuous job or do physical exercise, you may need to consume more.  Bottom Line:  Drink plenty of water!

Just like with water intake, we don’t require any specific exercise to go along with this plan. However, exercise will certainly help with your results.  Just getting some movement in every day can dramatically increase your results and your energy levels.  Many of our full members do online workouts, train for races, or go to the gym, but you should do what works for you.  If you can get some form of physical activity in every day (or most days), it will only serve to enhance your clean eating program.

We understand that you may not like EVERY recipe that we put on this meal plan.  It may be that you have some allergy restrictions or you just don’t like certain items.  So, we have compiled a list of guidelines for modifications if you need them.

NOTE:  With a full Clean Plate Club membership, you can actually copy the entire meal plan over to your personal account and then use the full meal planner application to delete items, add other items, and fully customize this meal plan.  More details on that are down lower on this page.

The electronic plan is set up in such a way that each meal serves 2 people and can easily be changed with the click of a button.  However, if you are just using the recipes from the links below, you’ll have to adjust recipes depending on how many people you’re serving.

Also, in 90/10, we aren’t big on exact portion sizes.  We have found that eating clean keeps overeating from being as much of a problem and the body is much more forgiving of calories.  However, you should be mindful of your serving size in the sense that you shouldn’t purposefully eat past full.

If there is a particular ingredient in a recipe that you don’t like and you would like to exchange it for something else, you can do that easily with the food tiers that you saved.

The concept is simple:  Find the item you want to replace on our tiers and replace it with a similar item on the same tier.  You could replace a fruit you don’t like with another fruit from the same tier (most fruits are on the green tier).  You could replace ground beef with ground turkey.  You could replace a vegetable you don’t like with another similar vegetable.

If there is a particular recipe that you don’t want to try at all, you can replace it with another meal from our database of hundreds of approved recipes.  You can find that HERE.

The meal plan doesn’t specify drinks (other than our water recommendations above) or condiments you may normally like.  So, we’ve put together some guidelines below.

Coffee and Tea – You can drink coffee and tea!  Yay!  However, it’s not usually the coffee or tea that’s the issue on a clean eating nutrition plan.  It’s the things you put in the coffee or tea.  We suggest a tablespoon of milk, half and half, or non-dairy milk (unsweetened) if you like cream.  For sweetener, we suggest honey or stevia drops.

Stay away from sugar, more than a small amount of half and half, syrups, and any barista concoctions for which you don’t know the exact ingredients.  Also, canned or bottled teas and coffees can easily have added sugars and artificial junk, so watch the ingredients carefully.

Alcohol – Although beer, wine, and liquor are on our “yellow tier” (which means you can choose to have some as part of your 10% allowance), we recommend you stay away from alcohol for these 5 days for maximum results and to really focus on eating good food.  If you do have some, a glass of red wine is your best bet.  Don’t worry, if you like 90/10, you can definitely work alcohol into your plan later.  Many of us do so with success.

Juices and Other Beverages – We would prefer you stick with coffee, tea and water for these 5 days but, if you have to have something bubbly or different, unsweetened sparkling water is acceptable.  We don’t recommend drinking juices as a beverage (eat the whole fruit).

The easiest way to tell if a condiment is ok to have is to check the ingredients and compare them to the TIERS.

In general, most mustards and hot sauces are pretty clean.  Ketchup and BBQ sauce usually have sugar and should be avoided or extremely minimized (there are a couple of brands like Organicville that are a bit better).

Salad dressings are difficult to find without sugar and junk ingredients, so we have easy dressing recipes on our site and the only salad on the meal plan has a dressing recipe with it.

There are three different breakfast recipes in this meal plan.  You can choose to do a couple of them more than once to make the 5 days or you can be even more repetitive.  For example, if the scramble is easiest for you in the mornings, you can do that 3 of the 5 mornings and try the other two recipes only once.

There are five different lunch recipes in this meal plan.  As with breakfasts, you can substitute any of them in more than once but we recommend you try the plan as is if you can.  Also, if you have leftovers from the night before, you can use those for lunch instead.