http://www.buzzfeed.com/christinebyrne/clean-eating-challenge?s=mobile
These kale and banana green smoothies were our delicious Mother's Day breakfast. Not good. Not good at all. I couldn't even finish it, and I'm like a founding member of the clean plate club.
We tried to take pictures of all of our meals, just to document our fun. This was our first lunch - shaved asparagus salad with shallots and fried eggs. This wasn't too bad. This was also before we both got put off asparagus. Like, I don't know that I'll ever be able to eat it again, it was that bad. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Not pictured: dinner of roast chicken with quinoa and kale and two snacks - a pear with raw almond butter and carrots with hummus.
Not sure what this is, but I'm thinking day 3's blackberry yogurt parfait with flax seed sprinkled on top. Not bad, except that we used plain yogurt and it did get pretty plain after awhile.
Oopsie, we got the wrong kind of cabbage - it was supposed to be napa (Amy), instead we just got regular green. This was a whole lot of crunchy, bland cabbage. This dinner was napa cabbage (or plain ol', if you are not detail oriented like us) wraps with chicken, tomatoes, mango, and avocado.
My biggest complaint was that the food wasn't very flavorful. For the salads there was always just a tiny bit of dressing. And always just a tiny bit of avocado, or mango, or anything yummy to flavor up the food.
This was day 3's Asian chicken salad with tamari-lime vinaigrette. I liked this lunch.
For snacks this day we had hot chocolate - unsweetened almond milk and 1/2 oz shaved dark chocolate. Not great. Also 3/4 an avocado with lemon and a pinch of salt. :/
For dinner we enjoyed cauliflower steaks with lentils. This was interesting, but not bad. I really liked the lentil recipe, it had vinegar, so a little kick to it. I would make this again.
Day 5 - cauliflower omelet. Weird. Not good. Wouldn't make this again. Don't try this at home.
This was one of the most dreaded and most surprising meals that we ate. It was originally a quinoa-fennel-blueberry salad with mint and lime. By this point we'd already had a bad experience with fennel - it is not our cup of tea. So we omitted the fennel, and Amy really wanted to just eat each part of this separately, cause it sounds weird, right?! I decided I was going to go for it and mix it all together so Amy decided to be a good sport too. And it was good!! I would totally eat this again. I'm not a huge fan of mint, but I actually really liked this lunch. Who knew?!
This one was also good - turkey-basil meatballs with collard I greens. This sauce consisted of all veggies and was really good. The vinegar in it gave it a nice kick.
Oh, this breakfast. Yuck-yuck. Asparagus with poached eggs. A whole bunch of asparagus. For breakfast. I couldn't handle it. It was not good. Not for breakfast, not at all. Turned off asparagus, still. Oh, not good.
We had to change things up because of our weekend trip. So the same day as the asparagus and egg breakfast, we had a lunch of shakshuka - which is tomato sauce, more asparagus, and more eggs. /: it was a rough day!
A yummy, but small snack of blackberries and pistachios.
Then there came the weekend away in NJ. I am really proud of us. We went on a road trip away and stuck to our clean eating diet! This was our lunch before our 5k. And it was not good. Arugula salad with salmon, green beans, and Dijon vinaigrette. Amy didn't mind it too much, but I really didn't like the cold salmon and arugula. That's another food I don't want to eat any time soon. Between the two of us, we probably ate 8 cartons of arugula. And fyi, that's a whole lot of arugula.
Not pictured was our road trip breakfast of chia seed pudding with mango and pistachios. I was really excited about it and I was really let down. When it's mixed with liquid, chia congeals into a slimy kind of gel, and we no likey. I ate most of mine, but amy couldn't stomach the slimey "pudding." Blech.
My other big complaint about this clean eating challenge is that we spent so much time chopping and prepping. It felt like we'd get up and immediately get to work on measuring and chopping stuff for breakfast. By the time we'd cleaned that, it was time to start prepping for lunch. Clean that, and snack. Clean that and dinner for us and then the family. It was like non stop washing, cutting, measuring, and cleaning. It was so nice to be able to share the work with Amy because it was just so much work!
That night we ate dinner on the boardwalk, and again, super proud of us! We ordered the best thing we could - a very plain chicken salad with Olive oil and vinegar. Iceberg lettuce with Olive oil and vinegar? Yikes. It wasn't the worst, but it sure wasn't the best. But we stuck to it! We ate our salads and didn't complain. Too much. (;
Another interesting and not terrible combo - an apple omelet. I think I might even make this again.
Another breakfast - cauliflower hash with fried eggs. Wouldn't make this again. Cauliflower for breakfast is just too much.
Oh arugula. I don't miss you. This was an arugula salad with eggplant, avocado, feta, and chickpeas.
And a final food picture of blueberry yogurt smoothies.
We were both glad we did this cleanse. I don't think it was like a crazy fad diet, just two weeks of very clean eating. We really were curious to see if we'd feel any different, and we both decided that no, we didn't. We did both have frequent bm's (sorry, tmi) and had enough energy to do all of our walks and runs. But we really didn't feel any better. We both lost a good amount of weight for two weeks, and that was nice, and I think we both reset our taste buds a little bit. Overall it was a good two weeks. Even though we had some grumpy days. Some more than others. (: we did it and I'd recommends to anyone looking to jump start their metabolism.
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