My 2-Day Cleanse Recap and Second Day of Eats

This week for What I Ate Wednesday I am doing a recap of my two day cleanse, featuring my second day of eats.

A couple weeks ago I decided that I would do this cleanse. A two day weekend cleanse. I can't really do it on the weekend because of my schedule, so I did it this past Monday and Tuesday. My goal is to eat in such a way that doesn't require cleansing, but I do enjoy following little plans like this now and then to check in with my eating habits. If I do a two day cleanse and feel drastically different and better, I probably need to change my daily habits. My hope was to feel good, but not much different than normal.

In past cleanses I have done I only focused on food. This time around I wanted to focus on not only my food consumption, but also resting my mind and body. I did light exercise (walking and yoga), slept plenty (no alarms and naps included), and I even went to the sauna as she recommends in the above linked post! I really enjoy saunas, and I had heard about the detoxifying affects of sweating before, but I normally do plenty of sweating during exercise. Since I was only doing light exercise I thought going to the sauna would be a nice way to get a good sweat in, and it sure was! They have one at the Georgia Tech fitness center that I had never used, so this pushed me to familiarize myself with it. I'll probably start going there regularly. It felt great to sauna, walk home, take a lukewarm shower, and then get into some comfy clothes.

On the first day of the cleanse, my plan was to drink the smoothie for breakfast and lunch and have the soup for dinner. After drinking the smoothie for breakfast though, I was not looking forward to having it again for lunch. It wasn't terrible, and I even enjoyed the first half of it, but it wasn't drawing me in at all for lunch, and I was not looking forward to having it for breakfast the next day either. Since I had the time, I made a big pot of the soup for lunch, and then the work was done for dinner on both cleanse days. The soup was good! I preferred it without the lemon, but other than that it was enjoyable and I didn't change it. 

I needed to add an apple to the first day because I was at work and too hungry to last until dinner. I think an apple is fully worthy of being on a cleansing menu, so I didn't feel bad.

In order to be excited about my second day of cleansing, I decided to make some minor changes to the smoothie recipe. I nixed the mint, avocado, and 1 pear, and added a banana. The mint wasn't doing anything for me, and the avocado was what really turned me off. I really wanted to like it but it just wasn't working. This was far more enjoyable for me!

I still wanted to consume the avocado though, and I wasn't crazy about eating only liquid for two days, so I sprinkled half of it with salt and a heavy dose of cumin and the other half with salt and lemon juice and ate it for lunch with the pear that I also took out of the smoothie. This plan worked much better for me!

I also added an apple and a cup of chamomile tea to the second day of cleansing for a late morning snack since I was at work and knew I'd be having a late lunch. This did the trick and held me over until 2pm when I finally had lunch.

For dinner I heated up the leftover soup from Monday, which I continued to enjoy. I ate it three times over the course of the cleanse, and I think I liked it more and more each time I had it. It definitely has a strong cilantro taste, but it's mellowed out a bit by the sweet potatoes it is blended with. Yummy yummy (though maybe not that appetizing)!

Here's a little summary of my cleansing eats and activities:

Day 1:

Lemon water

Ginger Pear Mint Smoothie

Yoga

Soup

Nap

Apple

Soup

Plenty of water throughout the day

Day 2:

Lemon water

New and improved smoothie (Same as previous day minus avocado, mint, and 1 pear, plus 1 banana)
Apple
Long walk with Carol
Chamomile tea

Avocado with 1/2 cumin and salt 1/2 lemon juice and salt, pear

Yoga

Sauna

Soup
Chamomile tea

Plenty of water throughout the day

So in the end, I added two apples, a banana, and cumin to the food consumption, and eliminated some mint, but that was all. 

The food items I was craving during the cleanse that I could not eat were: bread, eggs, and peanut butter.

The peanut butter is not surprising at all since I eat it so often and love it so much. I'm totally fine with craving bread, too. I make basically all the bread we eat, and a lot of it is from freshly milled whole wheat flour. Meaning, we eat pretty healthy bread and I'm comfortable with the amount of it that I normally eat. I'm sure it wasn't helping me that I made bread for Marshall to have with the soup. And I don't know what wagon you're in, but I'm in the eggs are healthy wagon and that's not going to change, so I was not disappointed to be craving those either. I think what my body wanted was more protein, and that's a good thing, so no craving concerns.

One thing I focused on more that I will hopefully continue to do is drink more water. Water is one of the only things I drink, but I still think I don't drink enough. I'm trying to make it a habit to always take a drink when I am thirsty and not put it off. Whether I'm trying to fall asleep, wake up in the middle of the night, in the middle of baking/cooking, or busy at work, water needs to be a priority!

So in the end I was very happy with how I was feeling at the end of the two days. Basically normal, just looking forward to my normal eating habits, which I established do not need to be changed. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have some chocolate chips on my PB banana toast this morning, but what's a little chocolate now and then going to hurt?

Nothing, you say? Yeah, that's what I thought.