So Long 2012

As we say goodbye to 2012, Trevor and I hope to also say goodbye to some excess pounds that have slowly but surely taken up residence on our bodies.  With my teaching/Vanderbilt class schedule and with Trevor's work/church schedule, we have severely neglected to eat healthy or work out in 2012...I mean hardly at all.  It is sad.  We also come home late and exhausted and usually collapse on the couch with some kind of comfort food - not a recipe for good health.

For those of you who don't know us personally (or all that well for that matter), let me take a second to say that I played sports all through high school and have been reasonably fit and active since and Trevor played college basketball and has also been reasonably fit and active since.  We used to pay a lot of attention to our eating also, so it's not that being healthy is something we don't know how to do.  Over the past year, it's just something that we haven't given proper attention to because we're always busy and running to the next thing.

While checking Pinterest one night (sitting on my couch when I could have been up moving), I came across Whole Living's 21 Day Cleanse.  I liked the look of it because the emphasis is not on crazy food combinations or on drinking some sort of crazy potion 6 times a day.  The premise is that everything is stripped down and the first week is only fruits, vegetables and nuts.  Then things are slowly added back in each week.  I liked the idea of eating real, whole food and concentrating on exactly what we are putting in our bodies.  It also is gluten-free, something we have been wanting to test to make sure neither of us is intolerant.  I asked Trevor if he would ever want to try something like that and he agreed that we should look into it.  We knew we couldn't start while I was still in school (quite a bit of prep involved), so we decided we would wait until we got back from our Christmas travel and use the week before I went back to school as a springboard to kick start our renewed emphasis on our health.

Saturday we went to the store to pick up a few things and just decided to do all of our cleanse shopping while we were there.  $149 later, we loaded up the car with all the ingredients for week 1.  $149, ya'll!  That is about half of our usual monthly budget, but I kept having to remind myself that it was worth it to splurge and spend more this month on healthy food.  We don't buy convenience food usually, and we cook mostly from scratch which is how we usually keep things under budget.  So tip #1 for starting this cleanse: prepare your wallet.  I would say of that $149, about $120 was all produce.  We have so much produce for this week that there is not room for it all in our fridge.  Crazy.

A big part of the cleanse is focusing on how food makes you feel.  We know that it is a bit more restrictive than what we are used to and we know that not all our feelings will be positive, but we are excited to try.  We will use this blog as a place to record our feelings about the cleanse as we go.

We will also use this blog as a source of accountability.  As hard as it is to admit that we haven't been very disciplined and have let our health slip from our priority list, we will be very open and honest about our successes and struggles as we go.  Once it's out there in the blogosphere, we have to continue on, even if it is not fun.

So, without anything further, here goes nothing!  (Did I mention that I'm hungry already?)   :)
Cheers!