Cleanse wrap up

So, you may have heard, we did a cleanse! It was pretty big time in our lives, and whilst part of the goal was to shift our focus away from food a little, it had the opposite effect and left us thinking about food 24/7. I am glad we did it, but boy was I glad when it was over. It was a lot of effort. And for someone who loves baking, it was a really boring week!

Over the next week I will post about some of the meals we ate over the week, because despite my initial fear over what on earth I was going to be able to cook, we actually ate quite deliciously (if I do say so myself). But this deliciousness eventuated from a lot of effort and came at a cost, literally, it cost us around 200GBP ($300) for the week!

My experience was overall fairly positive. Days 1-3 were tiring from lots of cooking at the start, but days 4-7 were mostly just boring. My husband didn't have such a smooth ride though. Days 1-4 looked like this: enthusiastic, headaches, cravings, disbelief (the first time in two years at his work they celebrated a colleagues birthday with champagne and cake), watering eyes, more headaches and mouth ulcers. Things picked up on day 5 though and then the boredom and frustration kicked in. But, we both stuck to it and feel like we were rewarded for it (some more than others, poor Pete). By the end of the week we had both lost some weight, definitely lost a large amount of bloating, had better digestion and it really made us take stock of our old habits, and what needs reforming.

If you are wanting to do a cleanse, here are my tips for survival if you're a bit of a foodie:

1. Make the turkey meatballs that I will post later in the week, they will save you.

2. Allow dried fruits. Dried mango and sundried tomatoes feel like such a treat half way through.

3. Make pesto. One thing we disliked was the lack of sauces/marinades, so pesto helped a lot!

4. Have a bag of nuts with you, always.

5. Eat lots of protein, it will keep you full.

In an attempt to keep some of the principles of the week going, we are going to do a maintenance day once a week, which will be so much easier to stick to, especially because now I know which meals worked well and which not to waste an afternoon on! I did notice that my milk supply was starting to decrease, so I was pleased with our decision to only do a 7 day cleanse. 

I could ramble on and on about the week we've just had, but I will stop there and start posting some recipes!!

If you have any good tips that you want to share, please let me know. Who knows, we may do another one again, one day....