Alexandra's Blog

So now that I've set out my goals for this 28 day Challenge, let me tell you how I've been doing meeting those goals thus far.

Day 1 went much like this: Going through my fridge to see what I can still eat, freaking out about how there's nothing in the fridge, going grocery shopping, and then freaking out about how small my fridge is. My fridge is just too small to hold all this delicious nutritious goodness!

It all resulted in a delicious veg stirfry with field greens, pumpkin seeds, tofu steaks marinated with hot sauce, and quinoa.

Day 2, yesterday, I learned three very important things:

One, you can't forget about hydration on the Thrive Diet... especially in the summer. At work we usually get coffee pretty regularly, but since coffee isn't allowed I passed on their offers, so I just didn't drink anything. Not good. By the time I biked home my mouth felt like the Sahara desert.

Two, you can make excuses to not follow through on your goals but there usually aren't very good reasons. Take for example, me accidently writing down the wrong time for my yoga class. I was sure it was 7:30, but when I got there at 7:20 I sadly found out that it starts at 7. It's pretty natural for me to have a defeatist attitude; a year or two ago I would've gotten very frustrated and gone home. Actually I probably would have gone home and ate half a pizza. Instead, I asked myself if there was any reason for this to stop me from achieving my goal of doing yoga daily. The answer? No!! It was a beautiful night, the sun was shining but not too hot, and I was about 2 minutes away from a beautiful park. I walked on over and did a 45-minute version of the Primary Series. It felt amazing!! I loved every second of planting my hands into the grass as I lowered myself through chaturanga, only to lift up and look above to the leaves parting ways to the sky.

Three, ALMOND BURGERS ARE AMAZING!! I took the recipe from the Thrive Diet and changed it up a bit to make it my own. I replaced about 1/4 of the almonds and used walnuts instead. I added fresh basil and red pepper flakes for a bit more flavour and spice. With just a bit of coconut oil, I threw the 4 patties into a frying pan and then topped one with slices of avocado, then wrapped it in lettuce. I almost died and went to heaven... seriously. After just one patty, I was completely full. Not gross, not undoing my belt full, but satisfied. I'm bringing one in to give to my veg boss, just to spread the almond burger love.
 

Oh hey there lovely ladies and gentlemen!

Can I just say how excited I am for the next 28 days? Very. I love doing monthly challenges. My friends could tell you about all the random challenges I've done over the past couple of years. Mostly they would groan, because even though challenges can be amazing opportunities for growth for the person doing them- they sometimes aren't for those that have to deal with the negative side effects. Like when I gave up all technology for a month, my friends were not crazy about me becoming a ghost.

But *this* challenge is not like that. Not only will it help all of us doing the challenge form a healthy sangha (community), it will also help those suffering from Crohn's like our Holly dearest. So I already feel really good about it all!

Everyone needs to be challenged in different ways, so allow me to tell you how I will be challenging myself over the next month or so...

This challenge actually fits perfectly into a larger series of goals for the rest of the summer. Much like Holly's 62 Days of Summer, I created a schedule where every week I add a new goal/ habit onto the last. The focus of the rest of July is my health and the big three: Sleep, exercise and nutrition.

So during this challenge I will be:

1) Sleeping no less than 6 hours a night
2) Doing yoga for at least 20 minutes a day, ideally an hour four times a week
3) Biking everyday
4) Following the Thrive Diet: no dairy, no eggs, no coffee, no gluten, no corn syrup, no white sugar, white flour, white potatoes or white rice. Oh ya, and no beer!

The first three goals are pretty reasonable, as I've been following them more or less for the past month. Now, the new goal, and the real challenge is Goal # 4, which I'm most excited about since I'm doing it with all of the Pranalife crew.

I've decided to be pretty strict with the Thrive Diet. I completely understand some not wanting to, but I really want to kick it up a notch. I just celebrated my 8 year anniversary of being vegetarian (yay!!) so removing dairy from my diet is not much of a stretch. I've NEVER liked milk, I prefer coconut ice cream to regular ice cream and I get really sick of eggs. The only thing I'm sort of sad about is cheese... dear melty brie, we will reunite, I promise.

As for coffee, I already gave coffee up for 40 days this year for Lent and it was easy peasy! And I was a 2-coffees a day lass. I just replace it with green tea.

I'm really interested to see how my body reacts to eliminating allergens and all the white refined yucky foods so I definitely plan to stick to those as much as possible.

To be realistic, I will give myself 5 cheat days for the entire month, that I may or may not use.

So there you have it, world, all my goals written out in detail... I can't just forget about them now!

Good luck to everyone else following this Challenge, or whatever challenges they're facing =)

As for mine? Bring it on!!!