*First of all, I'm sure other people have different ways of jump-starting weight loss, and that's great. We chose to go this route--which was more of a fast than a detox, I guess?--because it had us "quitting the crap", so to speak, right off the bat. No soda, no beer, no chips, no cheeseburgers, no cookies. You get it. For us, it was perfect.
*Secondly, we are not doctors or dietitians. Like I said in my first post about the "detox", we have used resources and made our choices based on our findings, so please, do the same!
*Add in a couple of proteins. Todd had cheese with his afternoon veggies, I had a tablespoon of peanut butter with mine, and we both added a tablespoon of Feta to our salads. I'm a huge proponent of not totally denying yourself anything, and really, adding just a tiny bit of yummy goodness (I love peanut butter, Todd loves cheese) into our days helped us keep our sanity.
*Drink tons of water.
*Play with adding seasonings and different toppings to your salad. This really helped me, because let me tell you: at the end of the first night, I was SO very hungry, but couldn't make myself eat another bite of spinach. Yuck. Ugh. So days two and three, I changed things up. First of all, I realized that I wasn't chopping the Romaine and spinach small enough to suit myself. I KNOW that sounds ridiculous, but chopping them smaller made me a little bit happier about eating two honkin' bowls of leafy greens a day. I also chose to have add fruit to my lunch salad (strawberries) and veggies to my dinner salad (peas and tomatoes with Italian seasoning) and this made me happier. I ate balsamic vinegar with the strawberry salad and red wine vinegar with the veggie salad, and changing that gave me a new lease on life. Or at least the salads.
*Add a cooked veggie to dinner. The picture below shows steamed broccoli, but my favorite side we tried was "carrot fries", which were just chopped up carrots, a tablespoon of olive oil, three shakes of salt, five shakes of pepper, and four shakes of cumin baked at 400 for 20 minutes. They felt snacky.
*The "detox" really made the first day of our new eating plan (some might call this a diet, but we're not; we have totally overhauled the way we spend money on food and the way we eat, and we plan on keeping it that way until we've reached a target weight)seem decadent. Yesterday for breakfast we had two eggs with cheese in a whole wheat tortilla, and I was FULL. We tacked on a blueberry yogurt smoothie for good measure and I had trouble finishing everything. I could hardly wait to eat pita and hummus for lunch, where as normally I would have been craving Chick Fil A. All in all, definitely worth the time, the effort, and the hunger. Oh, yeah. And the crabbiness. We were extremely hungry-crabby. Watch out for that, folks.
