#eatpretty15 week 2: Cleansing

Happy Friday my friends!! Only 3 more days of the first weeks challenge of only drinking water. How has it been for you so far? It truly hasn’t been too difficult for me but I must confess that I did slip up once this week. I sat done to have dinner with a friend and completely forgot about the challenge and ordered a drink {huge gasp}! When I got home I couldn’t believe what I had done!! Other than that I’ve missed coffee dearly but have stayed strong. Please give yourself a pat on the back if you’ve been faithful to the challenge this far. I’m so proud of you!

This weeks challenge {January 19 -25th} should be a fairly easy for some of you- no sweets. This means:

No desserts
No ice cream
No frozen yogurt
No cookies
No pastries
No chocolate (yes it deserves it’s own category)
No candy
You get the picture. If you have a major sweet tooth, try replacing your usual dessert with some naturally sweet fruit like mango and strawberries. Or check out my recipe for Coconut Banana Chia Seed Pudding. Wait so if that’s allowed can we have banana pudding or regular pudding? No. If you’ve ever made either of those you know that they are completely different than chia seed pudding.

So why is no sweets this weeks challenge? Unfortuntly for all us ladies who love a good desert, added sugar is the single worst ingredient in the modern diet. It can have harmful effects on metabolism and contribute to all sorts of diseases. Scientist believe that it is added sugar who is responsible for many, if not most of today’s health issues: the obesity epidemic; the dramatic increase in diabetes; memory troubles, cancer, heart disease, fertility problems and more. In the book Sugar Shock: How Sweets and Simple Carbs Can Derail Your Life- And How You Can Get Back On Track (I know its a mouthful of a title)- scientist even link added sugar to sexual dysfunction. The book is a bit extreme because eating sugar in moderation and while having an active lifestyle isn’t detrimental to our health. BUT it does bring up a great point that added sugar is not good for our bodies. Added sugars (like sucrose and high fructose corn syrup) contain a whole bunch of calories with NO essential nutrients. So think of this way- it would take you running a mile to burn off the one candy bar you ate. And the even worst part that I learned in my Metabolism class- the way our body breaks down excess sugar is it eventually turns it into fat. Keep in mind that all of this does NOT apply to fruit. It is almost impossible to overeat fructose by eating fruit. So like I said before, lets replaces the sugary desserts with delicious fruit this week. I posted some delicious healthy sweet idea on my Pinterest again this week if you’d like to re-pin them! My personal favorite treat is vanilla yogurt with fresh fruit on top. Right now I’m obsessing over The Epic Seeds Chia + Greek Yogurt combo. These little babies are packed (I mean super packed) with nutrients and taste heavenly. So yummy!

I hope that I gave you a few solid reasons why we are giving up sweets for the week. If you still want to learn more, please feel free to email me! Or if you have any questions on what you can or can’t eat, email me! And for those of you who think these past 2 weeks have been easy breezy- don’t get to comfortable because we are about to pick it up in the next 3 weeks. Happy Friday my friends!

 

Xoxo,