First: "diet" is a stupid term. This isn't a diet. This is fixing your lifestyle. Diets end, diets changed, diets are in general meaningless in the grand scheme of things and are only useful for specific goals. Stop eating garbage.Completely. There is no such thing as "muh cheat day". That WILL cascade and ruin things back to your old "diet" 1. You should know where your food comes from. 2. You should know what your food is. - If you can't memorize the ingredient list of a food at the store: it isn't food. - If you don't know what every item on the ingredient list is: it isn't food. - most chemicals are bad for you. - * explained below. 3. YOU SHOULD NOT be relying on a (((COMPANY))) to make your food. YOU should be making nearly all of your food. There are exceptions - that being companies whose food products are good and honest. Milk - which has gotten a bad name - can be gotten from 100% grass fed cows who are antibiotic and hormone free. Though it's very expensive ($5 / half gallon). * these are kind of weird as early on in your change you may be looking at a food and see some chemical that you aren't sure what it is and following my ruleset would disqualify said food. That isn't always the case. There are things that you'll pick up overtime but ingredients are complicated and sometimes needlessly long. A lot of times when it says "flour" the flour will be fortified with various vitamins. You may see "Thiamin" (Vitamin B1) or "Riboflavin" (Vitamin B2) and not yet know what those are. So it's a very tough spot to start from. Things specifically to avoid; 1. soy - it's not just a meme 2. palm oil 3. sodium aluminum phosphate - more generally all aluminum anything in food 4. BPA in plastics which are used with food or contain food 5. ALL processed sugars 6. GMOs - this one is difficult as fuck and exceedingly expensive. Generally speaking though, if you follow the above, you don't need to follow this specifically if you can't.