New Year’s Resolutions:
#1 - Be healthier
#2 - Be a better artist
#3 - Be more organized
#4 - Be a better friend
Last year, my boyfriend and I tried the Clean Gut diet. To spare you from all the details, the diet is basically created to clean out what is in your system and then slowly add things back into your diet so you can figure out what kinds of foods you have problems digesting. Or to find out any other problems you may have with certain foods. It ended up being a great experience! I would totally recommend it to anyone. It helped us have a better understanding of our bodies and how food relates to our well being. We both felt wonderful, we started going on walks, and even though it wasn’t necessarily the goal, we both ended up losing quite a bit of weight (15 pounds!).
Well the diet lasted 21 days and that’s about how long we kept it up. By summer we were both back to our normal eating habits, which included a lot of junk, like tons! By December we had had it. We were ready to start something again. This time though, we didn’t want to just do a crazy diet. We wanted to do something sustainable, something that we could reasonably still be rocking come December 2017.
That brings us to today. Since January 1 was on a Sunday, and traveling for the holidays, we didn’t feel we could be prepared to actually start on the first day of the year. Instead we planned on prepping all day Monday, January 2, and then having our first meal that evening.
Our experiment with the Clean Gut diet helped us know which foods we should avoid so that is where we began. We made out a list of foods we can eat, what we can’t eat, and what we should only have on occasion. I started with recipes from the Clean Gut book and have branched out to some great Pinterest posts. I have found that our list of foods is very similar to Paleo and Whole30. We also moved all of our kitchen supplies to my art studio. This way when I’m waiting for something to bake or have time in between cooking ingredients I can work on my art!
My biggest downfalls are white sugar and carbs so decided to cut them out of my diet. Basically, no desserts, pop, or white flour. I LOVE sugar & chocolate so the thought of never having dessert again was a little daunting at first. After a couple weeks though, I have found things that stop my cravings and decided that I could have a tiny piece of chocolate once a week if I needed.
I’m going to begin writing about my cooking adventures on this blog. Afterall, I need to write about something and how many times can I talk about my insecurities or sewing follicles together? I’ve never thought of cooking and fine art going together, but that is what is happening in my life. So I’m going to share how they are coming together to help me be a better artist & a better human. I believe that if I start being a more healthy person it can spill over into other parts of my life and help me achieve my other New Year’s Resolutions.