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!!!
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