If you’ve paid much attention to our blog this year, you know that Beth and I challenged ourselves with a pretty specific diet plan this year. We started off going vegan for six weeks, including a three-week detox, and planned to follow that up with six weeks on a vegetarian diet. Unfortunately, that ended on Tuesday when we both took our first bite of meat for the year.
We have both been craving little bits of meat here and there and we have been more and more concerned about our kids diet. We just don’t have time to spend cooking up two complete meals each night, so we cook for us, offer them a try and, when they refuse it, they wind up with pizza, chicken nuggets, or hot dogs. Even our diet, as we moved onto the vegetarian diet, got worse as we started eating more bread and cheese as fillers. It started to seem pretty counterproductive, so we started to question whether a little bit of lean protein would actually wind up being healthier for us. We decided that we would begin allowing poultry and seafood, still refraining from beef and pork.
So we took the first dive on Tuesday when biting into a turkey sandwich. Since then, I’ve hit up Chick-Fil-A once and Beth has yet to have another bite. It has not become our focus, just another option for eating a healthy meal. On the one hand, we feel like we failed in our plan. On the other, we went a full nine weeks without eating a bite of meat. For these meat lovers, that is quite an accomplishment!
Since making our decision we have looked at our menu plan and we realized that we do not really have to change it at all. We can add a little chicken to pot pie or nachos or have some sliced turkey on a sub. We will likely continue this trend in future meal plans.
Did you start a new diet plan this year? How are you doing with it? Leave us a comment and let us know what’s going on!
I am doing Weight Watchers and I LOVE it. I lost a lot of weight on a low carb plan before and gained it all back. With WW, I can eat anything I want, in moderation. I feel like its a lifestyle I can live with, forever. If I am craving Oreos (I mean birthday cake oreos were literally screaming my name on the shelf) I can buy them. I can figure out how many points I have left for the day and realize that I can have FOUR cookies (that particular day) versus half the package (or who am I kidding if no one was around to watch I’ve come insanely close to finishing and entire package before! I love meat, I can’t imagine going this long without it. Congrats on that!
I have been incorporating a lot more vegetables and smoothies in our diets, but I can’t go the vegan or vegetarian route. I could easily give up beef, chicken and turkey, but I love pork and seafood. I think lean protein is important. I try to snack on a hard boiled egg every mid-morning and that helps me stay full and not snack.
I think nine weeks is quite an impressive feat! I’m not a total carnivore, but I do love chicken and seafood and I don’t think I could give it up for nine weeks. You did an amazing job! It’s not a failure – it’s a reevaluation of your needs.
You should be proud for what you did for the last 9+ weeks. That is hard. It sounds like you learned that you can eat some food items that are not in a vegie diet and still stay healthy!