Yesterday I successfully completed day 1 of the clean eating challenge!

For breakfast, I had a banana/kale smoothie. Pretty standard smoothie, nothing revolutionary. It was however, the first time I added vanilla extract to a smoothie so that added an interesting taste to it. I didn’t bother taking a picture of it because honestly, the last thing I want to do when I wake up in the morning is try to take cute pictures of my food.

Lunch was surprisingly delicious. Filled with arugula, shallots, asparagus, tomato, feta and 2 fried eggs, it almost seemed too big for one person. However, once I started to dig in, it was pretty hard to stop and before I knew it, I had wiped my dish clean. I felt pretty full and satisfied afterwards but unfortunately my brain is wired to crave sweets right after I’ve had a meal so restraining myself from reaching into the pile of candy I got for Christmas was excruciating.

For the first snack of the day, carrots and hummus were on the menu. Again, pretty standard snack, nothing picture-worthy there.

In the afternoon, around 4 p.m. it was hard to restrain myself from getting a cup of coffee…something I usually do every single day. The guide says that you’re allowed a cup or two of green tea but since green tea isn’t something I can easily stomach, I just did my best and drank water instead.

Dinner however was another surprise. When I saw the menu and saw baked chicken breasts along with wilded greens, I thought to myself: “here we go again.” As I was preparing this meal, I was so turned off by the way that it looked and my taste buds were ready to taste some bland, steamed goop again. But lo and behold, this thing actually had flavour! I’m thinking it was the vinaigrette that had saved the day, it added a perfect touch of freshness to the salad. Also, my chicken breasts turned out super tender and moist, which ended up making this meal quite savoury.

I ended the day with the nighttime snack: a pear drizzled with some peanut butter (the recipe asks for almond butter but I didn’t feel like dishing out another $10 for a small pot of nut butter)

I went grocery shopping in order to prepare for the Clean Eating Challenge I wrote about in my previous post and I have to be honest with you guys, I am NOT impressed by the prices of some of these items. So far, I have spent about $120 for groceries for Week 1 and there are still some items on the list that I have yet to buy!

I understand that it’s January and that most of the vegetables I needed are not in season so I’m thinking that perhaps during next week’s shopping, I’ll try to find more frozen alternatives. Frozen veggies are just as nutrient-filled, if not even more, seeing as they are frozen within minutes of being picked (and they cost a fraction of the fresh veggies price).

I’ll have to see at the end of this experiment if I ended up saving money with not going out and spending more on groceries but so far, I am just not very convinced that this kind of diet is a lifestyle that I would be able to maintain on a regular basis in my life.

I’ll let you guys know how day 1 went!

– Mari xx