I survived five days of clean eating. There were definitely times where I wanted chocolate, ice cream, and cake. I had a lot of temptations during the week – but thanks to some good planning and still being able to eat a lot of my favorite foods, I was able to survive!

Remember the good food I said no to this week at work? Well, I kid you not when I tell you that someone brought in a dozen or so amazing donuts this morning from Heavenly Donuts. They looked amazing – but I said no thank you.

Friday morning was a little rough. I was a bit of a cranky pants, I will be the first to admit. I wanted a bagel more than anything this morning. Instead I made another great smoothie this morning for breakfast. The ingredients were much the same as yesterday: a banana, blueberries, spinach, whey protein, almond milk and more ice today. I left out the peanut butter this time. It was a great smoothie. It was also day 5 of the cleanse and I was pretty exhausted from a long work week – I forgot to snap a photo of my smoothie. 😦

By mid morning I was hungry and the donuts everyone was raving about were just a little tempting – but I had come this far, I knew there was no way I was giving in. I broke into my snack bag of pistachios, almonds and unsweetened dried cranberries. This snack was seriously good, and I nibbled on some of the same mix every single day. It really helped me get through the week.

At 12:30 I went for a walk with a work friend. It was hot and humid and the sky could not decide if it wanted to rain or not. For 80% of our walk we were spit at by the clouds. The last 10% of the walk the sea breeze died down and we were stifled by heat and humidity – it was an experience of extremes! We were both glad to get out and walk, especially after the rain we had been having lately.

At one o’clock or so I ate my lunch. I was out of almost everything as of this morning when I was putting together my lunch – so I knew that getting through the day would be much more of a challenge than previous days had been. Today’s lunch consisted of one and a half of my homemade bean burgers on a bed of arugula and spinach. Because everything would have been really dry otherwise, I added a teaspoon of olive oil and a bit more of balsamic vinegar (another great combo that got me through this week!). It did not look pretty, who am I kidding, but I named this lunch beans and greens. That snazzed it up just a little bit. It tasted good – and today the bean burger reminded me of falafel which is one of my favorite things.

Later in the afternoon I had a few more snacks. Blueberries and strawberries:

An hour later a mini Larabar, and after that an apple and peanut butter. When I am tired, I find that I snack my way through the day. I definitely ate a little more than I should – but it was all clean and after the apple and peanut butter I was finally no longer hungry. I blame my snack-iness on poorly planned out lunch. I am really glad that I made it through until 5 o’clock without breaking down and snacking on left over donuts, chez its, or something else.

Now that it is almost 6pm, I can say I made it through – I am looking forward to dinner, but I do not have any immediate cravings or hunger and I love that feeling! I feel like I have succeeded in the project because I’m not noshing on a piece of sour dough bread as I speak. Victory!!

This leaves me with the question of “Now what?” I have made it through five days, and it was not all that hard – so where do I go from here? I hope (and like to think) that I will be able to reincorporate just a couple of my favorite foods and stick to a really clean way of eating for the most part. But I get bogged down with life, work, commuting, training for half marathons (training is starting next week for my fall races – I am almost looking forward to it?) and life in general. It is hard to eat clean and healthy all of the time. But maybe I can aim for a percentage I would like to say 80% clean and 20% less clean. We shall see how it goes.

But all bets are off for tonight – I am going to eat a burrito and I might have some frozen yogurt a little while later, and I think they will both be pretty delicious! Stay tuned, because the project will continue from here.

Happy Friday, blog readers! I hope you are ending your week on a wonderful note. See you soon.