Advocare Cleanse Phase RESULTS

Just kidding. I took real pictures!

I wasn’t expecting to see a huge difference in only 10 days, so it is surprising that I can see any difference in the above pictures.

Here are the before and after measurements:

Weight: before – 131.4, after – 130.2 (a note about this, I bought a scale for this, but it is a stupid mini scale, and depending on how I stand on it, it shows me different weights. The first time I stepped on it, it was showing 127, so it’s hard to determine if these numbers are accurate.)

Inches Lost:

chest -- 2 (not where I wanted to lose inches, but beggars can’t be choosers.)

waist -- 3 (woah!)

hips -- 1 (and yet I lost two inches in my chest. unfair.)

right thigh – .75

left thigh -- .5 (they are even now)

Total inches lost: 7.25

The lost inches in only 10 days are kind of amazing to me. I am so excited to see the results after the full 24 days! Bring on the Max Phase!

Advocare 24 Day Challenge Days 8-10

The last few days of the 10 Day Cleanse went pretty smoothly. It was harder to keep from cheating knowing that I was so close to the end.

Day 8

Breakfast: Back to the fiber drinks! Yum! Seriously, though, despite their gross taste, I love the way they make me feel. I didn’t eat breakfast today because I was driving home. I kept thinking I would stop and fix a meal replacement shake, but it didn’t happen.

Lunch: Zucchini noodles with cauliflower alfredo sauce. I added in some salad shrimp and peas. It was super yummy. I also had some hummus and celery.

Snack: Raspberries

Dinner: Dinner was a flop. I was going to make a meal replacement shake with peaches and spinach. It turns out the meal replacement shake does not do well in the blender. It got all frothy and yucky tasting. So then I tried to make eggs, but I added relish and those weren’t very good either.

Day 9

Breakfast: Again, after the fiber drink, I was running late and didn’t have time for breakfast.

Lunch: I was out and about at lunch and had not had any food, so I broke down and bought a sandwich at Target – turkey and brie. I also bought some cheddar bacon mac & cheese chips. Total will-power breakdown. The only redeeming thing was that I only ate half of the sandwich and one serving of chips.

Dinner: My parents made dinner for the boyfriend’s birthday, and it was all of my favorite things: steak, rice casserole, and squash casserole. I tried to keep my portions small, but I did have a buttered dinner roll with it.

Day 10

Breakfast: Meal Replacement Shake. I mixed the vanilla and chocolate together. Yum!

Lunch: I went for a run at lunch, so I wasn’t hungry for awhile after. I ended up eating hard boiled eggs with mustard and hot sauce at around 3:00.

Dinner: Boyfriend birthday dinner part 2. We went to a crawfish restaurant. I had picked out my order online – an order of crawfish and side of steamed broccoli. Except the restaurant didn’t have crawfish, so I had to make a snap (hungry) decision. I got the buffalo shrimp salad. It was kind of terrible. And off-plan. I will say it wasn’t fried, and I didn’t use the dressing, but there was bleu cheese.

I kind of fizzled on my last few days on the plan. Results post tomorrow!

How to Change Your Eating Habits Without Changing Your Friendships

So one of the struggles I’ve had so far during this cleanse is one that I’m sure everybody goes through in some way or another when embarking on a journey to get healthier – social pressure not to change. For me this comes out in two main areas: lunch with coworkers and time at the lake. I can already tell, at the halfway point of the 10 day cleanse, that this is a way I need to continue to eat. If that is going to remain true, I need to figure out a way to navigate potential social pit-falls to healthy eating.

Lunch with Coworkers

I typically eat out with coworkers 2-4 times a week. We have three places we typically like to go – a Greek place, a Mexican restaurant, and a sandwich shop. My coworkers definitely don’t care what I actually order, but it is SO hard to make good decisions while eating out. No matter how good for me it is, I feel like a chump ordering a salad, and paying more for it, than eating the nachos I know I love and that I am used to eating. One solution is definitely to brown-bag my lunch, but then I miss out on bonding with my coworkers. Plus, it’s nice to step away from the office in the middle of the day for a break.

My Solution

This is what has been working for me. Some of you may be able to make the healthy choice at lunch. And that is awesome. And some people may be happy bringing their lunch. Also awesome. I’ve found that for me the best thing is to bring a lunch to work that I can eat at my desk before going with my coworkers out to lunch. If I absolutely can’t resist eating while I’m there, at least I’ll only get a small plate item to pick at instead of a full unhealthy meal.

Time at the Lake

My boyfriend’s family has a lake house and that is my boyfriend’s happy place. He loves to be there on the weekends, and I frequently accompany him. We are there nearly every other weekend in the summer, and at least once a month the rest of the year. Lake culture for his family generally involves doughnuts for breakfast, BBQ sandwiches for lunch, an afternoon of beer drinking, and a late dinner of some sort of grilled meat with Ready Rice or Mac&Cheese and canned green beans. There is also yummy cheesy-carby snack food during the day.

When I first started dating my boyfriend, I ate (and drank) along with everyone else. Over the course of the year we’ve been dating, I’ve slowly cut out the drinking and doughnut breakfasts, but I can’t resist those snacks and dinners! They are yummy! Also, I feel like I am a guest in his family’s home and I feel so grateful that they let me hang around so often and that they are willing to feed me.

During this cleanse, though, it was hard to navigate those snacks and dinners. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings by not eating what is being offered and provided to me. At the same time, I spend so much time there that it would be impossible for me to “cheat” every time I am there and still achieve my health goals.

My Solution

This is something I’m still having to figure out. Obviously one solution is to get involved in the food preparation and provide some healthy options. I feel like that is a little tricky to do without stepping on any toes. I definitely think another solution is to recognize that my way of eating now is very different and just because I’ve changed my eating habits doesn’t mean I am judging anyone else’s eating habits. It is ok to have some of those yummy snacks and dinners, as long as I am just having a taste here and there instead of cleaning my plate.

Does anyone have any additional solutions for the above situation? I’d love to hear suggestions!

Advocare 24 Day Challenge: Days 4-7

I did a post about what I ate the first few days, and thought I would continue, if for no other reason than as a reference point for myself for future cleanses. In days 4-7, you don’t have to take the fiber drink in the morning; you add two teeny tiny probiotics pills instead. Definitely a welcome change!

Day 4

• Breakfast: 2 hard-boiled egg yolks mashed with mustard and sriracha, with the whites chopped up and mixed in. This may be my breakfast for the rest of my life. I am in love with this breakfast.
• Lunch: I went to Crossfit during lunch because I had Happy Hour plans for after work. When I got done I had a Meal Replacement Shake (I mixed half of a chocolate pack and half of a vanilla packet together. It was very good) and an apple.
• Dinner: Happy Hour was actually dinner. I had a spinach salad. It came with bacon, but I asked them not to include the bacon. It did have baked goat cheese on top and I did leave that on. Totally worth it!
• After-dinner Snack: I made some homemade hummus for later in the week and had to try it out with some peppers and celery. I’ve been trying to make homemade hummus for YEARS and have never been able to make it taste as creamy and delicious as store-bought. It turns out the secret is a good blender! I bought myself a Vitamix a few months ago and that hummus was AWESOME!

Day 5

• Breakfast: Fail. I was running late and needed to get in to work early, so I skipped breakfast. Which led to . . .
• 1000 calorie lunch: I was so hungry by the time lunch rolled around. I had a big salad with my lemon-tahini dressing; a cup of Weight Watchers summer squash soup; more homemade hummus with carrots and celery; a cup of raspberries/blueberries/blackberries.
• Dinner: My mom was hosting Bunco and invited me to sub. I went off-plan for the night and had the shrimp, crab, and artichoke casserole she made over rice, salad, two pieces of french bread, havarti cheese with crackers, and vanilla icecream for desert. It was good, but man did I feel BAD when I got home later. The casserole had half and half and cheese in it and all of that dairy did NOT agree with my mid-cleanse stomach. Also eating so MUCH food was a problem.

Day 6

• Breakfast: My favorite eggy breakfast!
• Lunch: I was talked into going out to lunch for a coworker that was leaving. It was the same place I had been for happy hour earlier in the week, so I got the spinach salad again. This time I didn’t leave off the bacon. Honestly, I could have done without it, it didn’t make it THAT much better.
• Snack: Homemade hummus with sweet peppers and a carrot
• Dinner: I went to my boyfriend’s parents’ lake house for the weekend. His whole family was there to celebrate his birthday. They had a frozen lasagna prepped for dinner. Luckily his sister was in town and knew I was doing this cleanse, so she prepped some awesome veggie side dishes. We had eggplant, tomatoes, and kale chips. I had a tiny piece of the lasagna because the rest of his family was sort of pressuring me to eat it, and I was a guest in their home, so I didn’t want to be rude. This was a tough situation that I had to finagle all weekend.

Day 7

• Breakfast: Still at the lake, but I brought my hard-boiled eggs with me!
• Lunch: Tuna salad with chickpeas and herbs
• Snack: My boyfriend’s sister made her awesome guacemole. I chopped up some carrots so I could eat some (mostly) guilt-free. Dinner was suuuper late, so I had some cashews and almonds around my normal dinner time
• Dinner: The planned dinner was porkchops with canned green beans and corn on the cob with lime butter. I had a few bites of my boyfriend’s porkchop and half of an ear of corn (I did not pass up that lime butter). I was given somewhat of a hard time again, but I felt like I was eating enough to not be rude. I loaded up on the green beans and a tomato/onion/cucumber salad his sister had made. There was cookie cake for birthday celebration desert, but I’m not much of a sweets eater, so it wasn’t a big deal to pass this up. (Not to be snobby, but the fact that it was grocery store cookie cake as opposed to Great American Cookie Company helped make the decision easier!)

Thoughts on days 4-7: These days were a little harder to navigate. I had social obligations that I didn’t want to miss out on. At the same time I didn’t want to alienate anyone but sticking so rigidly to my cleanse that I couldn’t enjoy time with friends and family. I think I will do a follow-up post on this issue later. Back to the fiber drink tomorrow!

Advocare 24 Day Challenge: Days 1-3

In a previous post, I talked about the supplements I’ve been taking during the 10 day cleanse of the Advocare 24 Day Challenge. Today I wanted to talk about the food I’ve been eating.

Day 1: This was definitely a learning day for how to eat on the cleanse.

• Breakfast
• 2 egg yolks mashed with yellow mustard and sriracha and topped with the whites chopped up. (I read about this “no mayonaise egg salad” on a blog. I wish I could remember which one, because I am now OBSESSED.)
• Chocolate Meal Replacement Shake with So Delicious Coconut Milk. (I have since read that you shouldn’t drink the Meal Replacement Shakes on the Cleanse because of the dairy. I’ve also read that I should only use water with the Meal Replacement Shake so that I don’t mess up the 1:1 ratio of carbs to protein.)
• Lunch: I had brunch plans with friends, and was still full from breakfast, so I had a fruit cup. It was very hard not to have a Bloody Mary with brunch because I LOVE Bloody Marys.
• Dinner
• I had to go to an event with my boyfriend’s family, and were all served the same plate of food. I ate the baked salmon and mixed vegetables off of the plate, but I had a bite of the mashed potatoes that were also on my plate. I also had a very small bite of the chocolate cake that had been sitting at my place during the whole meal. It was hard to pass up the bread bowl and more of those mashed potatoes because I was SO HUNGRY by the time we ate.
• Snack: I was still hungry a couple of hours after dinner, so I had a 100 calorie pack of walnuts and almonds

Day 2:  Hitting my stride meal-wise

• Breakfast: Same egg mixture as Day 1. Yum!
• Mid-morning: Spark!
• Lunch
• Spiralized zucchini noodles with cauliflower alfredo sauce. This was my first time making cauliflower alfredo sauce, and it was yummy.
• 1 cup raspberries and blueberries
• Snack: Hummus and mini sweet peppers; Spark!
• Dinner: Weight Watchers Summer Squash Soup

Day 3: Some cooking fails

• Breakfast: I tried to mix my leftover zucchini and cauliflower sauce mixture with eggs to make some zucchini fritters. Cooking fail. I ate about half of it, but it was not very tasty.
• Lunch: Big salad with homemade tahini-lemon dressing; topped with tuna and a boiled egg. I also had a cup of blueberries/raspberries
• Snack: 1/4 cup pistachios
• Dinner: Another cooking fail. I mashed some pinto beans with canned green chilis, canned chicken and salsa. I topped it with some greek yogurt. (Dairy and sodium fail!) It did not taste very good. I ate until I was satisfied, but the leftovers went into the trash.

Final thoughts about days 1-3: I still had a lot of excitement about starting the cleanse. I was excited to fill my fridge and belly with healthy foods and felt good about what I was eating.

Advocare 24 Day Challenge Cleanse Phase: The Supplements

On Sunday I started the Cleanse Phase of the Advocare 24 Day Challenge. If you will remember, my last attempt was a fail.

Part of my motivation for doing this cleanse was that I feel like I have been steadily gaining weight over the past year, and recently I stepped on the scale and saw a pretty scary number looking back at me. However, when I weighed myself on Day 1 of the challenge I was down to a much lower weight – about five lbs lower. Weird, but a pleasant surprise. My weight fluctuates a lot, so it will be interesting to see what the scale does during this challenge.

The cleanse phase consists of 3 products: the fiber drink, herbal supplements, and probiotic pills. Here is my experience with the supplements so far.

1. Fiber Drink: If you do any googling at all about the 24 Day Challenge you will find that the fiber drink is the bane of a good cleanser’s existence. It tastes yucky. There’s no getting around it. It comes in two flavors: chalky-watery-peach, and wood-pulp-citrus. Most people recommend the peach for its more tolerable consistency and flavor. The citrus is supposed to be slightly more “scrubbing” to the system. It doesn’t matter all that much, because you are going to have to choke it down regardless.

Some people recommend adding a little with-pulp orange juice. There are so many natural juice options available now, I don’t see any problem with adding a little juice to the water/fiber drink mixture. I bought a cold-pressed mango/apple juice that I’ve been adding to make the fiber drink go down, and even adding just a couple of tablespoons of the juice helps mask the flavor so that all I’m dealing with is the unpleasant consistency. The fiber drink is only taken on days 1-3 and 8-10.

2. The herbal supplements are three tablets that, according to the website, “help rid your body of the impurities that may be obstacles to achieving better health.” They are to be taken right before bed, and are taken on days 1-7.

For some reason I think these tablets are making me wake up in the middle of the night. I can normally sleep through the night, but since taking these I have been waking up in the middle of the night and lying awake for a couple of hours. I’ve googled to find out if this has happened to others, and haven’t found anything to explain the issue I am having.

3. The probiotic pills are tiny white pills taken for breakfast on days 4-10. All I know about probiotics comes from the old Activia commercials, but I am currently listening to a podcast about what they are and what they do that is very interesting.

Along with the supplements you are encouraged to eat “clean” – that is, no alcohol, fried foods, or processed foods, and very limited dairy, starches, oils, and fats. There are also Omega 3 pills that are to be taken 2-4 times a day.

Advocare 24 Day Challenge Cleanse Phase: The Food

It seems there are some discrepancies over what should and should not be eaten during the the Cleanse Phase of the Advocare 24 Day Challenge. In general though, foods to avoid are:

• processed foods
• fried foods
• alcohol
• starchy carbs
• dairy
• sugar
• excess salt

Instead, the focus is on eating (and drinking) the following:

• WATER (1/2 your body weight)
• vegetables (especially the green ones)
• lean protein
• fruits (being mindful of the sugar content)
• complex carbs (quinoa, sweet potatoes, whole grains)

Everybody has different food preferences, which is one of the nice things about this cleanse. Nobody is trying to make me eat a grapefruit half every morning. (I hate when people try to make me eat grapefruit!) Here is what I loaded my grocery cart with for the cleanse!

• tuna packets (I didn’t even taste tuna until my mid-20s because I was so turned off by the smell. Now I love it!)
• frozen shrimp and frozen tilapia
• blackberries, blueberries, raspberries (I can and frequently have eaten a whole carton of berries on my way home from the grocery store. Not cleanse friendly.)
• cauliflower, zucchini (500 of them), squash, asparagus (super good for cleansing!)
• baby kale/baby spinach, tomatoes, cucumbers, celery, carrots, sweet peppers, onion
• quinoa
• hummus fixins
• almonds, cashews, walnuts, and pistachios
• EGGS (2 cartons)

If my grocery hall looks a little light, it’s because I live by myself, so all of this cooking is for one. I’m not a huge fan of chicken, so almost never buy it. Also, I didn’t buy ALL of those vegetables at once. My rule of thumb is to buy only a couple of different types of “dinner vegetables” a week, otherwise they tend to get neglected/wilty in my refrigerator.

What are your favorite “clean” foods? Please don’t say sweet potatoes! (I just cannot get on board, no matter how many different times I try!)

Why I Failed the 24 Day Challenge

I first heard of Advocare at a bachelorette party. The bride-to-be had large canisters of Spark with her that she claimed were her morning coffee replacement. (Sidenote: this was the second time I had heard of Spark. We had a teacher in high school who used to drink Spark regularly after her lap-band surgery, and I know she always had tons of energy.) I knew she had gotten in to Crossfit, so I thought that was some sort of Paleo thing she was into. Another girl there announced she was about to start the 24 day challenge. I asked her what-all it entailed (I am always intrigued by a food challenge), but the thought of giving up fast food and alcohol for nearly a month seemed daunting.

I got home from the bachelorette party and did some more research. I saw some amazing before and after photos and thought that could be me. I did some more searching and placed my order for the 24 Day Challenge with someone who promised (via her website) to coach me through the process.

A few days later, my package arrived in the mail, and I was ready to begin. Except that I wasn’t.

1. Temptation at every turn. At the time, I was living with three boys. The awesome thing about living with three boys? There was pizza on the dining room table every single day – sometimes multiple brands – and nobody cared if I nabbed a piece every now and again. When they weren’t ordering pizza they were cooking delicious-smelling carby fried foods.

2. Lack of prep-work. Along with the challenge of sharing a kitchen, refrigerator, and cabinet space with three boys who enjoyed cooking, I was also commuting an hour to work each day. I was leaving around 7 in the morning and not getting back until 6:30 at night. At which point I needed to think about breakfast, lunch, snacks, and even dinner for the next day. It just wasn’t happening.

3. Lack of will-power. My coworkers love to go out to eat for lunch, and I love the fellowship that brings. On the days I did actually get my act together and take a lunch, I was easily persuaded to save it for another day and go out to lunch, and with this challenge, that was just a fail waiting to happen. 24 days sounds like a relatively short amount of time, but the temptation to cheat eventually wore me down, and once I was off of the challenge wagon, there was no going back.

4. Confusion. I had so much trouble figuring out when to take what pills. There is a handy website that tells you what to do each day, but for whatever reason I just could not remember what to take when. ESPECIALLY after the 10 day cleanse. Those MNS packs are tricky little buggers, and I never did get the hang of when I was supposed to take them correctly. The coaching I mentioned looking forward to earlier was not very existent. I very much felt on my own during the whole process.

5. Lack of commitment. I didn’t even take before measurements or weigh myself in. It’s been a while now, but I don’t think I really committed to the challenge, and it takes commitment.

Desired results.

Actual results.

 

Despite DNFing* the challenge, there were definitely some things I enjoyed about the products. I continued to take some of them, and came back to taking others of them. I got comfortable taking my leftover MSN packets – and there were a lot of them!  I felt like the challenge could work now that I had a better understanding of everything that goes into it, and now, one year later, have decided to give it another go! Updates to come!

*DNF = did not finish in marathon-runner lingo. I’m not a marathon runner, but like to trick people into thinking I am one by using the terminology.

I Will Try Anything for Promise of Weight Loss

Since finishing school, I have carried around an extra 10 lbs. Lately, though that 10 extra lbs has crept up to closer to 15-20. Apparently at a certain age, it gets harder to bounce back from Taco Bell lunches and pizza dinners.

Over the years, I have tried so many plans, books, and exercise classes. I like to think of health as my hobby – my brain knows what to do to be fit, but I just haven’t been doing it. On this blog I am going to share my health adventures and my trials and errors. I also want to share some of the things that I’ve tried in the past that have worked for me. Hopefully I can tighten up some bad habits that have crept in and get healthy!