Spring Clean your Diet...

Toss a few heavily processed staples - Instead of overhauling your pantry all at once, start by eliminating corn oil and soda—both highly processed. Another easy step is replacing refined breads and pastas made from white flour with ones made from whole grains.

Focus on favorite foods - To keep it simple, assess what part of your diet supplies the most calories, suggests Mary Ellen Camire, PhD, a professor of food science and nutrition at the University of Maine. If you’re an omnivore, buy meat that comes from grass-fed cattle and eggs from pasture-raised chickens, but stick to conventional produce instead of organic.

Shop the perimeter- Most whole, natural foods are on the outside aisles of grocery stores—that’s where the produce, dairy, and meat sections usually are. As you go deeper into the center of the store, you encounter more processed and packaged food.

Check the labels -It’s the easiest way to distinguish a "clean" food from a highly processed one. Think about it: A head of lettuce has no label (totally natural), while a bag of ranch-flavored corn chips has a dozen or more ingredients (highly processed). Instead of eliminating all processed foods, study the labels on the packaging and choose those with fewer and simpler ingredients (avoid hydrogenated oils, artificial flavors and colors, stabilizers, preservatives, excessive amounts of fat and sodium, and added refined sugar).

Think nutrients per serving -Consider the amount of nutrients in a product rather than focusing solely on price. Ask yourself if the price of the food is worth the nutrients (or lack thereof). You can make this assessment on every item by comparing the protein, fiber, minerals, and vitamins against fat, sodium, sugars, and chemical additives. Some clean eaters also focus on the environmental impact of the food. Some stores are promising to make the assessment easier. Walmart is phasing in a sustainable product index designed to help consumers judge at a glance the environmental impact of a product (including food).

Cook more meals at home - This is an easy way to shift more of your resources toward whole food and potentially save money. Plus, many restaurants rely on highly processed food to create their meals. To make home cooking easier, master a few one-pot or one-pan dishes with simple ingredients that you can whip up quickly and that will feed the family for days.

Adjust your tastebuds - If you’re accustomed to eating food with lots of salt, sugar, fat, and other additives, you’ll need to retrain your tastebuds to appreciate the more subtle flavors of whole foods. For instance, if you don’t immediately like the taste of brown rice, mix it with white (in decreasing amounts) until you adapt. (You can do the same thing with whole grain pasta.) It works for salty and fatty foods, too. Instead of switching immediately to, say, low-sodium soups, mix a regular can with a low-sodium version and adjust the ratio toward less sodium as you get used to the flavor. It can take up to 12 weeks to adjust.