Nutritional Challenge – Changes

Day 7 of no sugar, gluten, dairy, or alcohol.  Eating healthy doesn’t mean you can’t have delicious and tasty food!

Only 1 day of slip ups which for the most part were out of our hands…look I know we could’ve CHOSEN to not have alcohol or dessert, no one was MAKING us consume these things. But stressing out about our food choices will not benefit our bodies either. So yes, we had beer (Zach) and champagne (me) and ate desserts (shared mini desserts and didn’t Repeat the same one). The food at the wedding was amazing and I’m sure there was sugar and hydrogenated fats in there, but I didn’t stress about it. We did make the conscious effort to not eat bread at dinner and didn’t stuff ourselves. So I’ll take that as a win while dining out.

CHANGES I’VE SEEN IN THE PAST WEEK

• Sleeping better
• More energy and less drained/exhausted
• Less irritable
• More aware of snacking vs. hunger
• More regular

EXPLAIN

Overall, I am trying to eat balanced meals of proteins, carbs, and fat but I am NOT measuring and portioning out my food.  That is WAYYYYY to stressful plus the food scale is dead AGAIN. Because I did follow the zone diet for a while, I have an idea of how much carbs I need at each meal and what the portions look like (chances are if you aren’t including fruit, grains or starches, you are NOT EATING ENOUGH CARBS).  As for healthy fats, I’m just eating ’em and probably way more than the normal/average person would. If I’m hungry, it is probably because I did not include enough fat in my meal.

Grilled pork chop (magic mushroom seasoning – NOM NOM PALEO), grilled peach, and roasted string beans

If I “monitor” my carb intake, I do sleep better and have better sustained energy throughout the day.  Last week was a lot of work hours, but I didn’t get physically/mentally drained.  All of that, I attribute to evening out my blood sugar throughout the day so that I don’t have those spikes of energy and crashes that make me want to grab the Swedish fish or chocolate covered pretzels.  By avoiding the crashes, I don’t have spikes of cortisol throughout the afternoon/evening which impact me winding down at night.  Instead my body is starting to adjust back to the normal cortisol rhythm of decreasing at night and not keeping me wired.  Other than Friday night, I have been able to easily fall asleep and sleep throughout the night, only to wake up right before my alarm, thanks more to my dog.  I’ve even been able to get up for the 5:15am CrossFit class 3x without saying FUCK IT back to bed, I’m tired! Don’t get me wrong, I’m still not thrilled to be at class that early, but I got up!

AND I’m less likely to start picking fights with my husband.  I don’t know if he would agree, but personally I feel like the past week I’ve been less likely to make snarky comments about certain things not being done or not getting any help. Basically, I’ve yelled less in the past week, HA.

Roasted lane snapper served with broccolini and cauliflower rice

Then the lovely topic of poop, hehe.  If you don’t poop at least once a day, you should consider yourself constipated. Yes, you may not have the common symptoms associated with constipation like abdominal pain but you should be eliminating waste on a daily basis from your body.  Since upping our veggie intake significantly, like half the plate is vegetables, I’ve been more regular – need that fiber!

THIS WEEK

Below is our meal plan for the week. I’ve also included what we ate over last week so that you could see.  I do usually wing our meals on the weekend as our schedules really depend on the weather and what is feasible to get done so these usually aren’t planned out in advance.

One thing I started last week that I’m going to continue is, only eating starches for breakfast if I worked out.  So today, I went to the 5:15am CrossFit class then ate about 1/2 cup of sweet potatoes with my breakfast. However, tomorrow I don’t plan on working out in the am so I’ll load up on green veggies only.