DAY 5 Getting Comfortable
Welcome to DAY 5 of the 7 Day-Junk Foods to Super Foods Challenge!
How is your mental clarity? Typically I hear from people that this is the first improvement they notice in their health.
Hopefully, you are starting to understand what it means to eat a healthy diet full of nutrient-dense Super Foods (i.e. veggies, fruits, beans, nuts & seeds).
I also hope that you are feeling more comfortable with your eating and food selection. This 7 Day Challenge will take you from Junk Foods to Super Foods in just one week, but that doesn’t mean it is easy. Stick with it! You are over the hump and heading for the home stretch. You owe it to yourself to see how you feel on DAY 7.
On DAY 5 you want to consume the following:
- 1 pound of non-starchy vegetables
- 3 fruits
- 1 cup of beans
- 3 Tbsp. of nuts/seeds
- 3 Tbsp. of dried fruit
One Day 5 you want to avoid the following:
- Eliminate Refined Foods and Sugars
- Limit whole grains and starchy vegetables to 1 cup (combined total).
This is a lot of food to fit into your day, so it will help to have a plan.
I recommend starting your day with a breakfast of Fruit. If you chop up fruit in a bowl you can add walnuts, flaxseed or hemp seeds on top for a bit of crunch that will help satisfy your hunger as well as your Nut/Seed requirement.
For lunch, I recommend getting busy meeting your Veggie requirement. Have some Zesty Tomato Soup along with a hearty salad. Two cups of basic salad greens with added veggies (i.e. broccoli, cauliflower, onions, mushrooms) and black beans should do the trick.
If you are interested in maximizing your weight loss, check out the 0,1,2,3 Diet Plan.
This is how it works, you build your day and add Super Foods as you go along. Hopefully, you can see that you can add in a lot of good foods early in the day and give yourself more freedom at dinner.
For dinner, I recommend cooking a pot of Bean and Barley Soup. This soup is easy to make and will satisfy the remainder of your Bean requirement as well as your veggie requirement. You can have a piece of fruit for dessert or a serving of a fruit dish. I suggest the Apple and Peach Delight for an after-dinner desert (This is also a great breakfast item).
Do your best to fill up during your meals, but if you get hungry in between meals I suggest you have raw veggies or fruit.
On DAY 5 Avoid ”White Foods”
DAY 3 is the first day you remove a food choice from your diet, namely sugars and refined foods. Removing sugar is pretty straightforward, you want to avoid foods like candy and cookies. You also need to omit sugar from coffee or tea.
Refined foods are a bit more tricky to understand. Refined foods have been stripped of many of their vitamins and minerals.
A good rule of thumb is that refined foods are white (white flour, white sugar, white rice…).
In a way, you can think of refined foods as having all of their colors stripped away and nothing is left but white.
Be careful of marketing when you are in the grocery store. A package can use some pretty interesting wording to get you to buy their refined foods and believe they are whole grain.
Bread can add caramel coloring to make it look like whole wheat and packages can say something along the line of ‘made with whole grains’, yet still be very refined.
The trick is to turn the package over and read the ingredients list. The first item should have the word ‘Whole’ in it (i.e. whole wheat or whole wheat flour).
Above and Beyond
Let me know what has been the biggest challenge for you over the past few days of changing your diet? How did you overcome the challenge? Let’s start a conversation in the comments below to encourage everyone along!
About the Author
Dr. Becky Gillaspy, DC graduated Summa Cum Laude with research honors from Palmer College of Chiropractic in 1991.