Why use Clean Slate?

Glad you asked 😊

We like cover this question in detail. This is because people who struggle with binge eating and perfectionism say stuff like:

I've failed other apps!

News flash! That is not your fault. You were set up to fail. That is because most apps will stress three things:

• No breaks: You must track every meal on every day.
• Tracking many things: calories, carbs, minerals, etc.
• Planning in advance and in detail when and what you'll eat.

However, again, that is a recipe for failure!

Recipe for failure. Really?

Sadly, yes.

That is because people who struggle with food tend to also struggle with perfectionism and self-compassion. This is where any mistake is treated as a failure and the diet is abandoned.

Unfortunately, the stuff above, like meal planning or tracking macros, can play into that. It creates a ton of rules or targets that can be broken or failed.

This, in turn, leads to distress, abandoned diets, and binging, as we cover here.

And this sucks!

Not just because it is painful. But also because it made you hate tracking your food. This is arguably the most effective way to lose weight, according to researchers.

Wait, are you serious?

Yup!

Here is why. If you've never tracked calories before, you don't know how many calories are in foods you eat. And this would not be a problem, if weight loss was not all about calories.

In fact, trying to lose weight without knowing how many calories you're eating is like trying to play a game with your hands tied behind your back. Doomed to fail.

Tracking fixes that!

That is because tracking teaches you a skill we call caloric awareness. This is the ability to know roughly how many calories are in the foods you eat.

Once you master this skill, you can lose weight without having to track your food. In short, you can live your life without being chained to a diet or app.

That, ultimately, is the goal of Clean Slate. We want you to track food without hating the process. Especially if you suffer from disordered eating.

How we do things

The Clean Slate philosophy is based on five things:

• We give you a fresh start.
• We ignore the irrelevant.
• We teach you stuff.
• We are really fast!
• We built it for people like us

We give you a fresh start

In practice, this means two things.

• We reset your logs each day.
• We prevent you from planning anything but today.

Both encourage you to treat every day as a fresh start. And this matters. A lot.

Weight loss is hard. Stupidly hard. You will have days where you just mess up. You could eat an entire pizza or a whole box of Oreos. Who knows!

However, as long as you:

• Learn something.
• Forgive yourself, a skill called self compassion.
• And don't give up.

It doesn't matter.

You don't have be perfect every day. As long as you succeed some days, you will lose weight. It is just how the math plays out. All diets work if you don't give up. So embrace the fresh start! Treat each day like another chance to try again!

We ignore the irrelevant

Every diet, from low-carb to paleo, will lead to the same result if you eat the same number of calories. Guaranteed.

This means counting carbs and avoiding food groups is silly. One, it is unnecessarily restrictive. Two, it is a distraction from what research shows actually matters. This is minimizing hunger through caloric density and protein, which we cover here. Hence, we only track two numbers: calories and protein!

We teach you stuff

Clean Slate comes with a completely free, evidence-based curriculum. It covers useful stuff like:

• Dealing with hunger and craving.
• How to exercise.
• How to improve your sleep.
• How to eat healthily
• And much, much more!

And this stuff matters. A lot. That is because weight loss is a skill. So many people assume they can't lose weight because they've failed before. But really, it's because they never learned the skills to succeed.

We want to fix that.

Also, you don't need to use the app to get the curriculum. It is free online here.

We are really fast!

Clean Slate is faster (and different) due to our philosophy. To lose weight:

• You need to know how many calories you're eating about 90% of the time. That means eating simple food that is easy to track. We call those Basic Foods. For example, one pound of carrots will always equal ~ 180 calories. However, one brownie could equal 200 calories or 700 calories. Who knows! It all depends on how it was made.
• You don't need to log the other 10% of what you eat. The occasional brownie at restaurant or birthday party is not going to derail your progress. Plus, the point of those events is enjoyment! Nothing makes people hate calorie counting more than doing it without breaks.

Hence, because we omit the food we cannot estimate, like brownies, we can log everything else much faster. For example:

• Log ingredients via search.
• Log ingredients via barcode scanner.
• Log calories and protein directly via Quick Add.
• Create custom foods and recipes and log those.

We built it for people like us

Both of us, Mika and Paul, have been obese or have suffered from disordered eating, like binging. We felt other apps were too complicated and promoted perfectionism. We just wanted one that promoted self-compassion and education. That would not make you feel terrible for messing up!

Also, we love educating people and have done something like this before! We founded moneycoach.io to offer free, financial education through animated, YouTube videos.

You've hit the end

Ready to give Clean Slate a try?