28 Day Mind Body Challenge

Roman and I have begun a challenge. We will be cutting out processed foods, added sugar, dairy, gluten, caffeine and alcohol throughout the challenge. The challenge is taken from the February 2012 issue of Whole Living Magazine. It is broken up into three weeks and a bonus week.

Included in the magazine as well as at WholeLiving.com are recipes for each week. On the Saturday of each week, I will pick out which recipes we will be consuming for each meal of the day and write them all out on a Weekly Meal Plan chart.

To help keep ourselves dedicated, I made a binder. This process took me about an hour on a Saturday morning and adding to it each Saturday should only take a half hour for the following week.

I made three dividers labeled Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner, into which i added printed copies of all of the challenge recipes (in plastic sleeves). I am proud to have finally came up with a meal planning tool! We have a seperate binder with all of our recipes taken from online or printed by my Mother in law. The challenge recipes will be added to our master recipe folder at the conclusion of the challenge and the new binder will serves as a weekly meal planning tool to which i can add a weeks worth of recipes.

This week's challenge is to "go back to basics with simple meals made only with purifying fruits and vegetables that power both body and mind."

I have chosen this week's recipes and made a shopping list for Sunday though Wednesday. All of the ingredients are fresh so I broke up the grocery store trips in two. Today we went to Whole Foods and spent $150 on mostly fresh produce. I'm sure produce may be more affordable at farmer's markets or using coupons at a cheaper store, but I loved that we didn't have to search for the best items, everything on the shelves at Whole Foods is almost perfect! We also had to pick up a few spices that we didn't have as well as apple cider vinegar, olive oil, and tahini paste, so that wont be an issue later in the week. It felt like a big chunk of change, but then i reminded myself how much we spend in an average week on eating out and that we will feel much better eating fresh and healthy food.

This is all of our produce for the first half of the week. Note that some of these items will also be used later in the week.

Has anyone ever made Kale Chips? Is there a type of Kale that you prefer?

These are the seeds and nuts we need. They are all used for multiple recipes and are going to be great snacks!

So now that we have everything we need to get started, I will prep our meals for tomorrow,


Day One of the Mind Body Challenge!