Fall Change - Starting with a Cleanse

A few weeks ago Hayley McGowan (a trainer I read online) challenged her readers to put a greater focus on nutrition and health as summer came to an end. I was feeling pretty confident that I didn't have that much to change since health and fitness-wise, my summer went pretty well. I ran a lot, took long walks with the boyfriend, ate pretty healthy and was getting a good amount of sleep. Maybe a few minor tweaks here and there, but nothing major.

But then life got a little hectic for the last month. Suddenly I wasn't sleeping well from the stress in my life and started eating more calories and drinking more coffee to compensate for my tiredness. In addition, my activity level dropped and in the last two weeks I got so busy that I only ran once. ONCE. This came both from being tired and not making the time to be active. I did get a few long walks in and we ate relatively healthy but I could tell that my body just didn't feel like it was running at its prime.

This last weekend marked a new chapter in my life and with it should come a decrease in the stress that I dealt with in September. So this weekend I re-activated my gym pass (it's getting colder here in Vancouver for outdoor stuff) and restocked my kitchen with lots of healthy options.

I'm also starting off the eating change with a 48 hour cleanse that Dr. Oz had in the Oprah magazine earlier this year. There is a few reasons that I chose this one as opposed to all the others that I read. First, I don't believe in most cleanses that consist of juice detoxes or apple-cider-maple-syrup-cayenne-drink detoxes (yes these exist) as being more than something that will cause me to lose water weight. Also like normal people, I don't enjoy the feeling of wanting to gnaw my arm off from starvation. This one seemed to include real food and with whole grains (quinoa) and protein (also from the quinoa). In fact, looking at the menu, it seemed to be A LOT of food. Also, besides the green juice involving pineapple-kale-mint drink, I have made a variation of most of the foods on the list before.

So today I am done Day 1 and I have a few thoughts on it so far:

• There has been a ton of food, almost to the point that it feels like too much
• I had tons of energy throughout the day and didn't feel hungry at all
• I switched the blueberry smoothie to breakfast and the quinoa to lunch since I don't have a blender at my work to make the smoothie
• The quinoa recipe called for way too much water. I would cut it down to 2/3 cup of water and since I didn't enjoy my prunes to be so soggy, I would hold them back till after the quinoa is done cooking and then just stir them in before eating
• I really enjoyed the taste of ginger, nutmeg and quinoa together and think that I will have to make this again sometime. I am also thinking that pumpkin spices and quinoa, and heck, maybe also some pumpkin with the pumpkin spices would be an awesome breakfast/dessert dish
• The green juice was way tastier than I had thought it would be. Tasted like mint and lemon
• If you are not into the green juice, the Dr. Oz website has another version (I found this out later) of a fruit juice (no blending required) or suggests snacking on raw veggies between meals if you get hungry
• The soup recipe says it "makes enough for at least 2 meals" and should actually read that it makes enough soup for 10 meals...maybe more (see above photo)
• The soup cooking time of 1 hour was a bit too long, I felt 35-45 minutes was plenty
• I upped the amount of paprika in the soup recipe to 2 tablespoons of sweet Hungarian paprika and 2 tablespoons of hot Hungarian paprika since I am Hungarian and well we those sort of things
• I have never taken an Epsom salt bath before...um...it's pretty great. Admittedly I haven't taken a bath in years so maybe I just enjoyed relaxing in a bath. Here's info on how to take an Epsom salt bath

I'll report back on how Day 2 goes tomorrow