LaLa Photography

So, I am finally in the home stretch of my 21 day cleanse.  Thank heavens!  I cannot take much more of this.  I have not cheated a single time, but this past week I dreamed of cheating most of the day.  Ugh.  It made for a very long week.  Week 1 was not so bad.  I cannot say the same for week 2.  Let’s recap the past week, shall we?

For some reason, around day 9, my mental state with the whole cleanse went downhill.  All of the sudden I was thinking about chocolate, cake, cookies, tacos, eggs, coffee, cheese, yogurt, and candy nonstop.  Seriously, all day long I thought about food.  I desperately missed eating a solid dinner all of the sudden, where the first week I didn’t crave anything and I didn’t miss dinner.  I don’t know why things changed.  I thought about quitting a lot too.  The frustrating part for me was that I was feeling great.  Full of energy, rarely tired, etc.  Yet I was grouchy because I was missing things from my diet that I thought I really needed!  So why does our mind crave the foods that will reverse the great feeling that I am having (which is the entire point of doing the cleanse)?  Why would I want to go back to that crappy feeling that I get from sugar and processed food for just a few moments of happiness while it is in my mouth?  I still can’t figure that out and it is annoying to me that the cravings were so intense during week 2 when I was feeling so much better.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what I could be doing differently so that I would feel more satisfied during this final week instead of living in another week of misery.  My plan of attack for week 3 is to do a better job planning my lunch meal – my only solid meal of the day.  I was pretty good about this in week 1 when I was fine with the cleanse.  Then I got really lazy with my lunches, and I started to crave more and more real food.  I think that the boring, lazy lunches were not nearly enough to keep my mind happy with the cleanse.

So Sunday evening, I went to the store and got all sorts of different things to make delicious, satisfying lunches.  I didn’t have a specific plan for my meals, but I got lots of fish and some ground turkey so that I have to actually cook my lunch.  I also got loads of veggies.  I had convinced myself that cooking a meal in the middle of the day would be such an inconvenience.  I didn’t want to clean up the mess.  I didn’t want to come up with a game plan.  I didn’t want to do any of it.  But this week I am realizing that it doesn’t have to be something complicated to be satisfying.  I just need to put in a little effort.  Yesterday I made seared Chilean sea bass and roasted zucchini, onions, and asparagus.  It was sooooooooo good and so easy.  Clean up was minimal and I finished lunch completely happy.  Made the rest of the day much more enjoyable.  Today I put in a foil tent mushrooms, zucchini, and salmon tossed with a little olive oil, salt, pepper, and dill and baked it for 12 minutes.  It took about 5 minutes to put this together and there was basically no clean up.  The meal was excellent and again, I left lunch happy and completely satisfied.  The past two days have not been easy, but compared to last week, they were definitely easier.

Last week I added a snack in every day.  I am kind of annoyed by that because I wasn’t having a snack because I was hungry, but because I was thinking about food nonstop.  The snack was always an apple and almonds.  My evening smoothies were definitely bigger in week 2.  Again, not necessarily because I was hungry, but because I was obsessing over food in general.  I wasn’t consuming a single unhealthy or unapproved thing, I was just eating more in an attempt to make my mind happy.  I am annoyed by this.  The purpose of the cleanse and consuming much less is to give your intestines time to heal and do detoxifying work instead of making them work hard on digestion.  I was definitely not pigging out by any stretch, but I was eating more than I needed to be for no reason at all other than my mind was freaking out.  I started drinking a lot of herbal tea, too.  Again, this is perfectly acceptable while cleansing, but for some reason I thought the tea would make up for something I was missing.  My mind and its relationship with food is very bizarre.  Very, very bizarre.

One thing that I am VERY excited about is that my desire to cook and try new healthy recipes is at an all time high.  I have been compiling lists of recipes that I want to make when this is done.  I plan to stick to a mostly paleo diet when I come off of the cleanse.  I am giving myself a day or a few days to enjoy the things that I have been missing – hopefully in moderation!  But then I can’t wait to start cooking healthy meals for me and the girls again.  There are certain things not allowed during the cleanse that I will be adding back into my diet – coffee, eggs, red meat, pork, and nightshade vegetables.  I am going to really limit my dairy and sugar intake.  I will start using almond or coconut milk in my coffee instead of half and half.  I am going to cook our dinners dairy free because eliminating cows milk from Annie’s diet has done wonders for her digestive system.

Another bonus to the added energy that I have is that I have been highly motivated to get stuff done!  I have completely reorganized the kitchen so that I can easily find the things that I will use regularly to prepare meals.  I have also done some organizing in my closet.  It feels great to get these little projects done.

Something I will be excited to be done with is the fiber/colon cleansing powder.  It hasn’t bothered or upset my stomach at all, but having so much fiber in my diet has made my stomach extremely bloated.  I am ready for that to go back to normal.  When I pat on my stomach it sounds hollow.  Really weird.  My stomach doesn’t hurt and hasn’t been crampy at all, it is simply very bloated.

So there it is, week 2 in a nutshell.  It was not fun.  I am VERY glad it is behind me.  And I am VERY glad that I only have 5 more days of doing this.  Oh yeah, I went in and did the Tanita scale on Monday again.  I will do that again next Monday morning when I am done with this – Sunday is my last day.  Last Tuesday I weighed 127.2 with 21% body fat.  This Monday I weighed 126.4 and had 20% body fat.  With this scale, you put in information about yourself in a computer program – your height, age, activity level, etc.  Then it measures your weight and body fat percentage and it gives you all kinds of information based on the data it has about you.  Guess what my metabolic age is given the information that it has?  13!!  I definitely liked that!

5. More. Days.  I can do this!!!

*Fair warning, this post has nothing to do with photography.  There are not even any pictures.  And it is long.  You have been warned.*

I thought I would give an update on something I am currently doing, which is the Clean Program by Dr. Junger.  I am following his detailed program of detoxing my body and healing my digestive system for a 21 day period.  I am not going to go into the details of exactly how the program works here, but I highly recommend you looking around the website and reading his book.  It is really fascinating when you get into it and I must admit, I never really understood the point of detoxing before now.  What I did understand was that I was extremely unhappy with how I was feeling on a day to day basis and I was going to do something to change it.

I chose this program because it works for me.  No way could I just juice fast for even a few days.  That is just not realistic or healthy for me based on my activity level.  I needed much more substance than that.  With this program, I have a smoothie for breakfast and dinner and a solid lunch that follows a pretty strict list of what I can and can’t have.  To give you an idea of what I can’t have while I am doing this, here is a list of common things – caffeine, dairy, soy, gluten, wheat, red meat, eggs, alcohol, nightshade vegetables, and some particular fruits.  You are advised to eat as organic as possible, but it is especially encouraged for your lean protein source at lunch – chicken, turkey, lamb, and wild fish are the best choices.  For all of my fruits and vegetables, I have bought organic and I am buying all meat from Whole Foods as it is definitely the cleanest choice for me.

I did not actually buy the kit that you can buy with the program.  The kit includes your brown rice protein powder, fiber, and all of the probiotics/enzymes that aid in the healing and functioning of your digestive system.  I found a list online where someone had broken down all of the supplements that you take when you do buy the kit so that I could buy them individually from vitacost.com and a few other places.  It saved me some money and I have enough of the probiotics and enzymes to continue taking for about a month instead of just the 21 days.  I take a lot of pills right now!

My goal of doing this cleanse is quite simple: I want to feel better.  I want more energy.  I want to sleep better.  I want to restart my body because I was eating so much garbage during the last part of this year.  I am not doing it for weight loss, but I am happy about the few pounds that I know will come off because of it.  Before I started, I was tired all day long.  I had no energy.  I was moody from being so tired.  I was tense and stressed most of the time.  I wanted to work on all of that.

I feel like I should give a little background on what the past year was like for me.  In January of last year I started Crossfit.  Within a month or two of starting, I was the leanest I have ever been.  I was eating strict paleo during the week with a free cheat meal on Sundays.  I was very healthy.  I weighed just under 120 pounds.  Well, late spring of last year, when life got really stressful, my body went into full panic mode.  I started gaining weight and developed full blown acne.  Despite the fact that I was working out really hard a minimum of 5 times a week, I kept gaining weight and my face would not stop breaking out.  I can’t even begin to describe how frustrating this was to me since I have been almost exactly the same size since I was a sophomore in college.  Sure, stress was definitely making me eat more than I had been, but honestly, I have gone through phases where I have eaten more than normal and never gained more than a couple of pounds from it.  This was definitely different.  My body looked like it never had before and it was not something I was happy about.  And nothing I did seemed to help – not eating a certain way or working out more.  Nothing.  By the end of the summer, I weighed 138 lbs.  I still cannot believe that.  It was close to a 20# swing from where I was just 6 months previous.  I eventually went to my doctor and insisted on blood tests.  I was sure there was something wrong with me.  He knew it was going to come back normal but to appease me, did the tests.  Of course, they were all normal.  He explained to me just how strong of an effect stress can have on your body.  Looking back, I am still shocked at the toll it took on me.  By late fall, I could tell that my body was finding its natural rhythm again all on its own.  I had ditched any sort of diet.  In fact, I was eating whatever I wanted versus following a strict way of eating, like paleo.  I was still working out the way I had been the entire year.  And one day the weight just started coming back off, just as mysteriously as it came on.  Even though I was eating loads of crap all throughout the holidays, I could tell that it was still coming off.  I don’t own a scale anymore because I had developed such an unhealthy relationship with it, but I know my body well enough to know that it was leaning back down.

The problem now was not my weight, it was how eating so poorly was making me feel.  My stomach was upset a lot of the time and again, I had no energy.  I just felt terrible by the time we got to January 1st.  I knew I couldn’t start before January 8th because the Cotton Bowl was the 6th and I knew I would be partaking in a lot of fun that whole weekend!  So, on Monday, January 9th, I started.  I jumped right in.  I didn’t do 3 days of just the elimination diet.  I was too anxious to just get started.

Going into it, my biggest concerns were that I would be starving all of the time and not getting enough calories to keep Crossfit in my normal routine.  I knew I would get the caffeine withdrawal headaches, but mostly I was worried about feeling hungry all of the time and not being able to exercise.  I was completely shocked on day 1 when I wasn’t hungry one single time throughout the day.  Prior to starting, I did email the extremely helpful people that run this program and asked them about exercise and doing this.  They told me that I should supplement my smoothies with things like organic raw almond butter, avocado, or coconut oil in order to get more calories in them.  I do this everyday.  I am on day 9 and I have only really needed a snack 1 day because I was hungry – I had an apple and a couple of carrot sticks.  I did have a snack one other day but it was not because I was hungry, but felt kind of shaky.  Eating a little something fixed that immediately.

On day 9, I am feeling a million times better than I was prior to starting this.  Despite my never ending struggle with sleep, I am full of energy and feeling great.  It took several days to get to this point.  In the middle of the night after my first day, I woke up with a headache that I thought might kill me.  Then I was tired and out of it for a few days.  But now I am in a groove and feeling much better.  If I could just get some sleep, I can’t even imagine how awesome I would feel.  I have maintained my schedule of working out 5xs a week and I am having no issues with that at all.

Eating a smoothie for breakfast is no big deal for me.  I did that most mornings already.  I just used to use whey protein and now I am using brown rice protein.  Whey tastes MUCH better, but I have grown accustom to the rice and it tastes pretty good to me most of the time.  My smoothies usually look like this – large handful of spinach, frozen organic mango and blueberries, flaxseeds, supergreens powder, rice protein, colon cleansing powder, almond milk and water.  At night, I put a whole, small avocado in.  Sometimes in the morning I put a scoop of almond butter in.  It just depends.  These are very filling and while they certainly wouldn’t be my go to meal, they are fine.  For lunch I have been having organic chicken and vegetables, salmon, lamb chops, etc.  It is weird to cook a big meal for yourself in the middle of the day, but I am getting used to it.  To simplify, I have tried to make things that will last me two lunches and feed the girls – like a roasted organic chicken and a big portion of veggies that can be reheated.  They eat it for dinner and I eat it for lunch.  It actually works really well.

On the first day, I used this fancy scale thing at my gym that records all sort of data for you.  At the beginning of the cleanse I weighed 130.2 and was 21% body fat.  I am going to see how this changes weekly.  After one week, I weighed 127.2 and my body fat was the same, which shows that I have shed 3 pounds of water and who knows what else.  I think my ideal weight is around 125 since I have added so much muscle over the past year.  I feel much less puffy and bloated than I did when I started, which is nice.  I used to be that girl that would never discuss my weight, and I weighed 10 pounds less than I do now.  But I realize now that it is simply a number.  My number is higher now than it used to be, but I am in better shape than I have ever been in.  So screw that dumb number and don’t let it define you.  I just told the world what I weigh and I could care less.

Here are the things I have noticed since starting this:

1. I miss coffee more than anything else.  Not the caffeine from it, just the shear enjoyment that I get from it. I will definitely be drinking coffee again and I can’t wait to have my first cup from Pearl Cup.  Herbal tea comes no where near giving me the happiness that a cup of coffee gives me.

2. I have not craved sweets at all, which is COMPLETELY SHOCKING to me. I usually have a ridiculous sweet tooth.

3. The further I get into this, the more delicious weird things seem to taste – like the greens powder and unsweetened almond milk – both of which I would have told you were so disgusting just a few days ago.

4. I know that I was telling myself before that I was much hungrier than I actually was.  This is proven since I have not been hungry from this at all and I am consuming much less.

5. My girls even like the random smoothies and will gladly drink them with me.  During this process, I have gotten Annie off of cows milk and onto almond milk and I bet I see her get some help in her digestion issues too.

6. It is very expensive to maintain a very healthy lifestyle.  I have spent a lot of money to do this cleanse correctly, but I think it is totally worth the money because my health is worth a lot.  It was especially expensive to get started doing this because supplements are not cheap and I now have a whole lot of supplements.

7. I can’t eat out at all while I am doing this.  Mainly because I feel the need to be in complete control of exactly what is going in my mouth right now but also because it would be torturous.  I have followed the rules very closely and I don’t plan on screwing that all up by eating a meal that is out of my control.  I have been bad lately about cooking and this has gotten me going again.  It feels great to be in the kitchen again.  With that being said, there are a few of my favorite restaurants that I cannot wait to eat at when this is over!

8. If you are wanting to do something like this, I highly recommend doing it with a friend, or several friends.  I have 2 out of town friends that are doing this – Emily and Deb – they are a few days ahead of me.  I love to check in on them and see how they are doing.  And then I have a local good friend doing it on the exact same schedule as me.  We check in with each other every night and are encouraging one another.  It is very helpful to have people to talk to about it.

So, those are my thoughts so far.  I plan on doing an update next week and then when the cleanse is completely done.  Feel free to ask any questions if you want to know specifics.

Meet 8 day old Sloane.  Such a little angel.  I just finished up her big brother’s one year series of portraits this fall and now it is her turn to get started.  He was a little sick, so he didn’t get to be in any of the pictures this time, but I can’t wait to photograph them together.  She was such a wonderful baby, and as always, it is such a treat for me to get to sit and love on the brand new babies I get to photograph!  Enjoy!!

At all of Benjamin’s past sessions, his big sister, Lily, has always been involved.  But this time Lily was at school and it was just Benjamin.  And let me tell you, he is one of the most precious, sweet natured, and happy babies!  Just so fun to be with.  I get asked a lot from clients about how often they should have portraits done in the baby’s first year.  It is definitely a personal opinion, but Katherine (his mom), does newborn, 6 months, 9 months, and 1 year.  Then, in each of the kid’s room, she has a 20×20 canvas from each of these sessions.  It is so cute!  Once Benjamin’s wall is done I will take a picture of their two rooms and show you how great it looks.  Enjoy this darling little boy!

These two are so funny.  They basically refuse to wear jeans/pants anymore, which is devastating to me because they look soooooooo cute in skinny jeans.  They both want a dress and tights everyday.  Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled that they love dresses, but I prefer pants and a top for school because it is warmer and easier.  They feel really great about these new dresses they got from Lee Lee for Christmas.  And they both decided that they wanted to work it for the camera.  They make me giggle.  And just as a sidenote, if you haven’t shopped the Harajuku Mini line at Target, you are crazy!  We own most of it because I adore it so much.  Too bad the girls hate it when I make them wear the adorable tees and jeans.  They also live in dress up clothes when we are at home.  Their FAVORITE activity of the day is getting fully dolled up to go to the mailbox – dress, crown, high heels, the whole nine yards.  And if by chance we run into a neighbor along the way that dotes on them, they glow with happiness and pride over their outfit choices.  But really, who can blame them?  I love it when someone dotes over an outfit choice of mine as well.   I am giving myself a pat on the back for it being January 3rd and me posting twice this year already.  It might be more personal posts than I did all of last year.  Woooooo hoooooooooo!

Raise your hand if you think you are looking good today…… This picture is sooooo Annie.  When she gets really excited she always puts her little hands up by her mouth like this.  Also, I want to someday remember that Annie has to have a band aid on her right hand at all times.  This mysterious boo boo has been here for months and we just can’t quite get rid of it.  And she is quite dramatic if you mention it.  It is only visible in her eyes, but it is a very serious ailment.