This baby sea turtle has nothing to do with this post. I just like it and it’s cute and it’s from our honeymoon so I just decided to put it in. I also thought I needed a photo somewhere in this post. Ok… that is all.
We have officially stopped doing CLEAN. Sort of.
Some may say that we quit, some may say we gave up, some may ask “what was the point?” and some may wonder how we could have gotten anything out of it already. I get it, that’s fine. But actually, we didn’t quit. We didn’t give up. There was a point. And believe it or not… we did get something out of it.
After one full week of a pre-cleanse and 4 full days of the actual cleanse, Brad and I decided to end it. Partially because we were hungry, partially because we had cravings but mostly because we got what we wanted out of it.
I’ll have you know I am 5’2″ tall. I am almost 26 and depending on the day I was topping out at 130 pounds. (Yes, I totally just confessed my weight on the internet and I am totally ok with it) I have a small frame but yet was somehow able to pack on a lot of weight over the last few months. 130 pounds for a girl my age and my height isn’t really “ideal”. I looked it up on like 5 different websites. 130 is at the high end of what I should be, on the verge, of well… “you’re getting close to not being an ideal weight so get your shit together”. We set out to do this whole CLEAN thing to get healthy and an added bonus would be to lose weight.
Which we did. We lost a lot of weight. I lost almost 8 pounds (I weighed myself when we began this and I was 128.6 and I’m now at 121). For someone my size, 8 pounds is a lot in one and a half weeks. We were dropping weight in a mostly healthy-ish way because we cut everything you could possibly think of as unhealthy out of our diet. We were living on mostly fruits and veggies and a little bit of protein everyday. We felt hungry… which we understood was part of the whole thing. But we wanted to start training for Tough Mudder and when you train for Tough Mudder, you shouldn’t be slacking on what you eat. And that was our biggest problem.
Training for Tough Mudder requires a lot of running. And a lot of weight training. And I was finding myself so completely exhausted and worn out only a couple minutes in to our workouts that I was secretly worrying. I felt weak when I was working out. Nothing about me felt strong. Like lifting a 10 pound weight was doing to do more damage than good! While I felt pretty good throughout the day, minus the cravings and dislike of some of the food we were eating, I didn’t feel good while I was doing what was really important… working out.
And so we made the call. No more. We needed to start eating “real food”.
And by “real food” I mean carbs and protein… and tomatoes and peppers and a lot of the things that we felt were important for us to eat with such a rigorous workout routine. We needed more protein in one day and not the kind of protein you get from the nasty protein shakes we bought (ugh… don’t ever buy vegan protein shakes, you’ll regret it). We needed to be allowed to eat a solid meal for dinner every once and awhile… I will say that some of the meals were very filling. And it’s not like we were depriving ourselves of food or starving ourselves or anything like that. But the book acknowledges that if you are an athlete training for something, you should almost double your food, juice and smoothie intake or hold off and wait to do CLEAN when you aren’t training.
We also stopped because we truly got what we wanted out of it. It was an awakening. We saw how badly we had been eating and what we had been doing to ourselves by not eating as well as we thought. We most certainly do not plan to go back to our old ways. We want to continue having juices and smoothies for breakfast and we really want to work on cutting a lot of dairy out of our diet. We want to eat a lot more meals that are from the CLEAN diet but we want to also be able to eat a damn tomato! And a jalapeno! Ain’t nothin’ wrong with jalapenos!
All kidding aside… I learned a lot. And we both really felt the effects almost immediately. Some meals we would eat before all of this felt like they just sat in our stomachs for days. Whereas with CLEAN you felt light and you felt like the food wasn’t trapped in your body while your body tried to figure out what to do with it. I did (do) feel more awake. I found myself not craving coffee in the morning for the caffeine. And let me say… I used to HATE coffee until I started having to get up at 3 in the morning. Then I started to love coffee. But I didn’t want it. I still took naps when I got home some days, but I didn’t take naps because I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t. I took naps because it just felt right to take them. I just felt good all around. And it was nice. But I just knew that it wasn’t working out as well as I hoped.
So you know what we did? We went out to eat on Thursday night. We went to a Mexican restaurant and ate chips and salsa and queso and we shared a margarita and we ate steak tacos and taco salads. And get this… the next morning we got up at 7 (well, Brad woke me up at 7) and did a full Tough Mudder workout and ran 4 miles in the 20 degree frozen weather and honestly… never felt better. See!? Proof!! There’s no way we could have done that while we were doing CLEAN. Just… no way.
And there you have it. That is why we stopped doing CLEAN.
But like I said, we don’t plan to go back to our old ways. I LOVE drinking homemade juices in the morning for breakfast. It’s my favorite part of CLEAN. I want to continue to do that. We want to continue to have 12 hours between dinner and breakfast. And we want to try to use a lot of the CLEAN recipes for lunches and dinner. Oh and I really want to make sure that I eat healthy snacks like apples, carrots and sugar snap peas. We are also going to limit ourselves to eating out only like once every 10 days. That includes breakfast, lunch and dinner. So we better make it worth it!
See!? We learned a lot and we are really determined to change our ways and keep them that way. I still have some CLEAN recipes to share that I promise I will actually get to. I just wanted to make sure to write this post (even though I’m writing it later than I wanted to) and explain why we stopped.
Ok… I’m done now. I have to go start dinner. byebye!
What Did You Eat Yesterday? 