A cleanse for foodies

Warning: there are a lot of words in this post, and bad bloggers that we are, there is a significant lack of pictures. We sincerely apologize. Almost every single meal, our appetites got the better of us before a camera could be whipped out.

After eating our weight in cookies during the holidays, and, well just really splurging on food, we decided it was time to finally try out a cleanse we’ve wanted to do for a long time. We wanted to challenge ourselves  to see how long we could go without a few of our favorite things (hello cheese and bread! I miss you!). So, over the last two weeks, we did Bon Appétit’s Food Lover’s Cleanse for 2014 (they come out with one each year around this time), which cuts out white carbs, dairy, and sugar. I’m excited to report that now, three days off the diet, I have not gone running back to any of them yet. In fact, other than a few bites here and there, we are still keeping up the pattern. And we feel great. Not incredibly different from before because we eat pretty healthy in general, but by the end it felt really good to be eating whole grains and greens. But it wasn’t always easy. It started out reeeaaally hard for me. And I took it as an opportunity to learn a few things about myself.  

For instance:

1) I am, in every aspect of my life, food-motivated.

2) I think about food all the time. 

3) Foooooood! I love food. And cheese and bread! (I thought I’d miss the sugar but it was the savory stuff that really got to me, grilled cheese please!!).

Taking away my ability to choose what I ate when, brought to the surface some very entrenched habits I’ve formed. I am constantly rewarding myself with food. Oh it’s too cold outside for you? You can have a a nice cup of hot cocoa and cookies when you get home. Oh, you are a little bored with work? Work 1/2 an hour more and you can have a special treat. Oh, you just found out you got a big grant to help fund the production phase of your documentary. Well then it’s time for a big splurge dinner out at one of the top restaurants in town, to celebrate of course.

So suddenly, when I couldn’t reward myself in these ways anymore, I had to readjust my whole outlook on life. Eventually I realized that eating different foods at each meal and having designated snacks and desserts was just about as exciting for me (I know I’m weird) as giving myself treats throughout the day, so when I wanted to reward myself, I’d get excited about the next snack or food item I was making that looked especially good and I thought of that as my treat. It worked pretty well. Still using food as a reward, but healthier food at least. And when we couldn’t celebrate good news with dinner out, we found new, non food-related fun in the city. We went to the largest indoor waterpark in AMERICA! Tau is preparing a post all its own on that. Let’s just say the film geek had to bring his GoPro.

I also learned on this cleanse that If I don’t space out my meals well, I am hungry ALL THE TIME. But once I learned to space out the snacks and meals for each day, I got through the day just fine. This is not a diet, it is a cleanse so it’s all about eating a ton of greens, lots of protein, and slow burning carbs, but there isn’t much in the way of portion control. They tell you how much to eat for snacks and say that the dinners serve 4, but overall you can eat as much as you want within the meals. It’s about resetting your body’s cravings more than losing weight, although you might lose a pound or two by the end of it if you do keep your portions in check.

Ta’u did better than me on the diet. He is not usually the one to choose what we are going to eat every night, so it was easier for him to just go with the flow of it, while I on the other hand was whining a lot the first week with things like, “but today’s such a good day for Pho, can’t we just have that?, or I’m craving spaghetti and meatballs tonight, but ugh, we have to eat kale and tofu?”

But, after the first week I settled in pretty well. And, the cleanse did live up to it’s name as a Food-Lover’s cleanse. All the meals were super tasty, very flavorful, and the sides and main dishes paired great together. There was a lot of variety and most of the dishes we want to incorporate into our normal routines. They give you a full shopping list for each week and it was mostly accurate with only a few missing items or amounts. We ran out of a few ingredients by the very last day, but not before. We used our ipad to see the recipes while cooking and could view each recipe with their ipad friendly step-by-step feature, which made cooking a lot easier.

But on to the downsides: My major complaint throughout was that there was so much cooking at night. Each meal had at least two to three components (I’m usually a one pot meal kinda gal), and then you had to prepare lunch the next day, which was usually recycled dinner on top of greens, but still took a little work. And then you had to soak something or do something to set up breakfast for the next morning. But, once you did all that, it was great because breakfast never took more than 10 minutes in the morning — an important thing for a person who’s always ravenous in the am. Then lunch was the best because all you had to do was open the fridge, open your container and eat. No preparation at all.

But come 5:00, it all began again. And the dishes. So many dishes. If you don’t work from home and you come home exhausted from work everyday, or have kids at home, this probably is an impossible cleanse to try as it’s just too much time and work in the kitchen at night.

The cleanse is not vegetarian. But it is basically gluten free, dairy free (with a little yogurt thrown in), and sugar free (agave and honey or maple syrup are used in a few salad dressings but not much else).

And finally, while we are listing the downsides, it is incredibly expensive, especially if you buy all organic as we did. It also includes a lot of greens (watercress, mustard greens, escarole….) that are not easy to find unless you go to Whole Foods or other high-end grocery stores. And even then, if you are trying to shop when it’s been -40F for the last two days, guess what? All the produce is either missing or looks like it froze in route and is all mushy and watery. So planning is key.

And finally, the breakfast, lunch, snacks, and dessert recipes are all for one person while the dinners serve four. For two people that made it pretty confusing. We had to always double breakfast and lunch and reduce dinner a little, but not too much because dinner elements were usually reused for lunch the next day and we needed two servings instead of one for those. So, calculating how much to get of everything and how much to make was a little challenging For the most part, though, we just made the dinners as they were and sometimes had a little left over that we’d freeze to eat at the end of the cleanse. And now, three days after, we are still eating up left overs and haven’t had to go shopping yet.

You can find the whole cleanse meal plan here, and at the top of that page are links to the recipes for the pantry (salad dressings and sauces that you make at the start that last the whole cleanse), the pdf grocery list, and some low alcohol cocktails that we didn’t try but look pretty spectacular.

Here are some of our favorite meals:

For breakfast:

Tomato farroto with fried egg

Steel cut oats with blackberries and hemp seeds

Avocado on rye crackers with smoked salmon

For lunch:

Avocado grapefruit salad with edamame (and watercress)

Squash and mustard greens salad

Chicken, mango, and black rice salad

For snacking:

Avocado smoothie

Sliced pear with goat cheese

For dinner:

Roasted butternut squash with lentil and brown basmatti rice pilaf, and kale with the greenest tahini sauce.

Lemongrass chicken with coconut black rice and garlicky bok choy

Roast pork tenderloin with mushroom apple saute and quinoa with walnuts and shallots

Chicken in a pot (finally a one pot meal!)

Tomato farroto with sardines and garlicky kale

Pan roasted salmon with grapefruit-cabbage slaw and refried black beans

For dessert:

Dates and toasted walnuts were our absolute favorite

This citrus salad on mango coulis was a close second. So good, but only possible in the winter when citrus is in season. I don’t even like oranges and I gobbled this up.

Coconut, pistachio, and cacao chocolate bark

Overall we give the cleanse two thumbs up if you work from home, have plenty of income, a dishwasher, and plenty of counter space. Otherwise, it gets one thumb up for good food and what it does for your body, and one thumb down for taking up so much time, being a little hard to calculate portions, and costing as much as a flight to Mexico. (Which is almost as important for a Minnesotan body right about now).

Have you ever done a cleanse? What about a juice cleanse? Ta’u’s wanted to try that but I think it’d be a disaster for my sanity. How about Bon Appétit’s cleanses? What do you think of them?

All photos by Pineapple Tree. From top: Albacore brochettes with warm carrot salad; broiled mackerel with scallions and lemon and beet salad with caraway and almonds; Tomato farroto with fried egg; Pan roasted salmon with grapefruit-cabbage slaw and refried black beans; Citrus salad on mango coulis with cacao nibs and toasted almonds