Day1

I'm not sure if I'll be posting daily, but I at least want to post once a week. At the beginning I'd like to post as much as possible to keep me excited about it. I find that when I'm excited about something, I do better with it, but if it becomes a chore... not so good.

Last time around, I attempted to do the challenge without having actually read the challenge. I meant to, but it never actually happened. I had a good idea of where to go because I'd read about half of Eat to Live, and could draw upon the nutrition classes I took in college, but I didn't have the specifics. I think that's part of why I didn't lose as much as expected. I did get rid of 20 pounds, but they weren't all within the 6 weeks like I wanted and expected, and my weight loss dramatically decreased when I started puttering away from the main concepts of Eat to Live.

This time, though I've still not finished the entire book, I skipped to the chapter that has the 6-week challenge so that I could familiarize myself with it and follow it. That helped a lot. I learned about the 90/10 rule, where when you're done with the 100% 6 weeks of plant food,  you eat 90% of your calories from plant based foods, especially greens, with a healthy amount of onions, beans, legumes, mushrooms, peppers and other colorful fruits and vegetables thrown in. 10% of the calories from non-vegetable based things. To clarify, here's the quote from Eat to Live,"The Life Plan diet should aim to be made up of at least 90% unrefined plant food. My most successful patients treat processed foods and animal foods as condiments, constituting no more than 10% of their total caloric intake."  I like that it's percentage of calories, because so many times, we talk in grams and that can get confusing, especially if you don't measure your food in grams. Calories, though, most people understand.

So far today, I've had 1.5-2 c frozen blueberries (defrosted) with a small amount of plain almond milk and a whole banana with about a tablespoon of raw, shelled,  sunflower seeds and about the same amount of ground flax seeds for breakfast. Normally I start getting hungry for lunch around 11 (which is what time it is currently as I write this) but I'm still feeling satisfied, though I can tell that lunch should come up soon.

Since the 6-week challenge states that you should not snack between meals, I'm going to make sure that I eat sufficiently during meals and only drink water between meals. Even though I'll likely have a slight headache at the beginning because of not being used to that, it'll be better for me because between meals, when my stomach is empty, is the time my body can finally start repairing itself from the toxins I've eaten and been exposed to my entire life.

I'm glad that yesterday was Fast Sunday for me as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, because it meant that for spiritual reasons, I went without food for two consecutive meals, and was an excellent way to prepare my body for this eating change once again. I was able to refocus myself not only mentally and emotionally for this challenge, but also spiritually, because we are spiritual beings, and when our bodies are sick, chances are our spirits aren't as well as they could be.