Clean Food Challenge - Day 1

I am an avid reader of the blog One Mom in Maine.  Last November, Emilie spearheaded a one-week clean food challenge and invited her readers to participate.  At the time, I was unable to participate due to a number of scheduling/work/travel issues.  However, I read along with Emilie and the other bloggers who were doing the challenge with her, and I filed it away for the future.  Well, Emilie recently decided to do the clean challenge again, and invited readers to sign up.  I immediately posted a comment on her blog and committed to the challenge.  Emilie asked her readers to send links to their blogs so that followers could read about their progress.  This request is what finally gave me the push I needed to publish this blog.  So, now that I have introduced myself, I will jump into blogging with my daily clean food challenge experiences.

The rules for the clean food challenge are pretty basic:

• No dairy
• No gluten
• No alcohol
• No sugar
• No processed foods
• No meat (this is optional - some people are choosing to eat meat, some are not)

Some people have also given up caffeine. I have chosen to drink one cup a day because I fear for my family's safety :)

Last Friday, I had my wisdom teeth removed (yes, at the age of 34).  So, the past few days have been spent eating yogurt, ice cream, cottage cheese, sorbet, soup and other soft foods.  Needless to say, I was fully ready for a cleanse.  I prepped by shopping for food on Sunday, and jotted down a list of meal ideas for the week so that I can plan ahead. 

Yesterday, (June 21st) was the first day of the challenge, and I have to say that it was a great success!  Here is a breakdown of the different foods I ate:

Breakfast - overnight oats soaked in almond milk and topped with thawed blueberries and a drizzle of maple syrup.  One cup of coffee with coconut milk (I chose to use the coconut milk creamer because I already had an open container.  It has very small amounts of dried cane juice aka sugar, but I feel OK about it.  I'll use regular coconut milk once this is gone.)

Lunch - Quinoa with black beans and corn.  This was delicious!  I'm so excited to eat it again today.

Dinner - Grilled sweet potato and zucchini and a large salad with avocado and a dressing made with olive oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice and miso paste.  I also ate organic tortilla chips (the only ingredients were blue corn, flax seeds, sunflower oil and salt so I figured they would be OK even though they are "processed."  Maybe I shouldn't have eaten them...) with a dip made from mashed black beans and salsa.

Snacks -   Watermelon, peaches and snap peas.  I need to add more substantial snacks to the menu for the rest of the week.  I'm going to make some almond butter tonight to spread on bananas and rice cakes.  I'm also planning to make a batch of hummus.

Overall, Day 1 was fabulous.  I'm hoping for another great day today!  Now I just need to figure out how to add pictures to my post so that the blog is more interesting to look at and read.