It’s Thursday night and I have nearly made it through my 3-day detox – barring that I don’t cave in and shove ice cream into my mouth in these last few hours of it!
Yesterday was the roughest day of the cleanse for me. I was feeling pretty icky from having a cold, and a lot of the time when my head is congested, I’m not in the mood for most foods – let alone plain cleansing foods like broccoli and beets. I alternated between feeling like I was doing fine with the detox, then wondering what the hell I was doing and wanting to crawl up in the fetal position with a bag of dark chocolate chips. š
Day 2 –
Breakfast
Lunch
SnackĀ
Ā Dinner
Dinner was the low point of the day for me, and this picture gives you a glimpse as to why:
My hubby ate delicious leftover homemade pizza and guacamole with tortilla chips while I ate the above meal. It was kind of torturous!
My exercise activities yesterday were a 30 minute walk with my pup + a 60 minute barre workout DVD. When I’m under the weather, it’s a delicate balance between resting and getting a bit of movement in, and this was a good amount of low impact exercise for the day while cleansing.
Day 3 –Ā
Today was definitely the best day of my detox. I woke up feeling a little better with less body aches than I’d been having because of my annoying cold, and I took Harley for an hour hike in the morning before it got too warm…
It’s a heat wave!
Breakfast
Surprisingly, I wasn’t even hungry, but I was afraid to exercise without eating anything at all, so I munched on some blueberries + raw almonds on the car ride over to the park.
I wore a very fitting shirt for a girl whose a vegetarian currently doing a cleanse from Vegetarian Times…
..and Harley was a pretty happy girl after our hike:
Lunch
Since I was feeling better, I decided to stop being a beet hater and incorporate them into my lunch. I made a spinach salad with sliced avocado and beets, toasted slivered almonds, a drizzle of olive oil + balsamic vinegar and a touch of sea salt. I also added some chopped dates to the mix because I was dying for some sweetness, and they totally spruced up the salad flavor. I don’t mind beets when they’re chopped up in salads like this, and lunch was not too shabby!
Snack
I made yet another frozen blueberry + unsweetened almond milk + honey bowl:
Dinner
This evening I tried another one of the recipes from the cleanse article. First, I made avocado ginger sauce by combing avocado, fresh ginger, fresh lemon juice, lemon zest, sea salt and olive oil.
I then sauteed broccoli with kale, onion, and garlic, and placed it on a bed of spinach. I topped the veggies with sesame seeds and some of the avocado sauce.
And that concluded my meals on this detox plan!
Besides hiking, I also did an hour kickboxing DVD of Jillian Michaels today. It was a little bit higher impact than I had planned on doing during this cleanse, but what can I say – I love to sweat!
My overall thoughts of the cleanse: It’s definitely doable for anyone who wants to try a detox but really is not into the idea of only drinking juices and not chewing a morsel for days (me!). While I definitely felt (and currently feel) hungry during it, I didn’t feel like I was starving throughout the course of it. I may try the detox again when I’m not under the weather with a cold, because I’m curious to see if I would feel more energetic during it. It felt nice to push the reset button and give my body a bit of a rest… but at the same time I’m looking forward to NOT eating spinach and broccoli and being able to eat other foods tomorrow (HELLLOOO almond butter, which I’ve been craving a few TBSPs of the entire detox!).
I also think that doing a cleanse is totally mind over matter. I wrote down an outline of what I’d eat ahead of time, then just tried to focus on everything else in my life besides food and what I couldn’t eat. I skipped looking at any scrumptious food blogs this week for fear of my level of self-control plummeting and just wanting to give up. Good move on my part I think, because I made it through 3 days of eating just broccoli, lentils, spinach, beets, almonds, blueberries, avocado and a few other easily digestible foods!
[…] Every time I’ve tried to do nothing but juice for fuel, I find myself hangry with little self-control by late afternoon – not to mention the fact that after several green juices, I’m practically repulsed at the thought of drinking another one. Let’s face it, I’m a foodie and I love to eat! So instead, I’ve tried different kinds of cleanses – ones that involve chewing – like the Vegetarian Times 7-ingredient cleanse (posts on that here and here). […]