Last Monday, I decided to start a two week ‘clean eating’ meal plan that was low sugar, low salt and low calorie (average 1500/day), with high amounts of veggies and no red meat. There were a couple reasons, but mostly I wanted something that would be a clean break from bad habits I had fallen back into. I found a free plan online and starting making out grocery lists the day before. I had some issues from the beginning, before even starting the actual meals, since many of the recipes had ingredients that I do not like at all (eggs, quinoa, and cucumber being among the biggest, but there were others) and I did my best to substitute around that. I tried to expand my tastes a little bit, though, but still keeping in ingredients I wasn’t sure about or hadn’t had before. Another issue was that the plan was only intended for one person, so I had to try to adjust dinner to feed my husband as well.
It was pretty rough going; I felt hungry most of the time and my poor husband could not handle the dinners. He suffers from ‘hanger’ pretty badly some times and can get cranky when he doesn’t have enough food. It wasn’t too hard to getting food ready the night before to take to work, but since we were running games at a convention on the far north side of town over the weekend, trying to pack meals and snacks for the weekend was difficult. By Sunday afternoon, while looking over the meal plan for the second week, I realized it was not working out for us. We sat down and decided to stop following the exact plan, but instead work on planning meals we knew and liked a week at a time, with a cheat day to account for special occasion or to satisfy cravings.
Some things I learned from the experience, in no particular order :
- You can lose five pounds in a week, but it’s not the healthiest and certainly not sustainable long-term
- Kale is pretty gross, especially in smoothies. But it’s actually kind of good roasted with a little olive oil and pinch of sale
- Salad for lunch every day get boring pretty fast, even with different toppings
- Sparkling water (I like San Pellegrino) + Crystal Lite liquid = pretty damn good substitute for soda
- Suddenly and rapidly reducing the amount of calories you consume can leave you pretty lethargic
- Almond butter and pear slices is an amazing snack
- Lentils aren’t awful, but they’re not exactly my favorite
- I’m way too much of a carnivore to not eat red meat for a whole week
- The line between hungry, not hungry, sated and full can be very small
So, all in all, I didn’t complete the meal plan per se, but I did more or less accomplish the goals that were the reason I started following it : I kick-started some additional weight loss, I curbed some of my worst junk food cravings and we’re getting more in the habit of making meals at home again. Not too shabby.
serquet 