Hitting The “Reset” Button

Usually I write a ton of blog posts on the weekends or during my weekday lunch breaks and schedule them to be posted later on throughout the week. Today is different: I’m blogging “live”, I suppose!

It’s Sunday morning and the boy and I just got home from a nice greasy-spoon restaurant a half mile (up-a-steep-as-f-hill on the way there!) walk from our apartment. We love this place because we can each get something we want: non-paleo boy gets french toast (he hates eggs, so breakfast is always carbs for him, unfortunately) and I have a wide assortment of eggy meaty deliciousness to choose from. Today was a special day because I decided not to get my usual: 2 eggs over easy with corned beef hash. Instead, I got an equally delicious Irish breakfast (sans potato, of course). Why the change? It has white potato; not only is that not paleo, but it’s against the rules of my new challenge:

Honestly, the first time I read about this on Balanced Bites, I thought it sounded absolutely ridiculous. First of all, I think “detoxing” is dumb. Yes, I said it, and I’m not sorry. The body is a well-oiled machine and if you put good things in it, you’ll be fine. Colon-cleansing, juice-fasting, Master Cleanse-ing… I don’t understand how people can truly believe these things makes us “cleaner” or “healthier”. In fact, there are plenty of reasons not to do these things.

Secondly, I like sweet things. Giving up wheat is easy, but I still love sweet stuff. Hell, I just made a batch of these last night… and proceeded to eat about half of the batch soonafter. If that wasn’t sad enough, I also created a recipe for dairy-free, vegan, paleo chocolate chip cookie balls to share with all of you… and ate about 1/3 of the batch within the first 12 hours of their existence in my kitchen.

So what? I ate a ton of treats this week (including a pint of dairy-free, refined-sugar-free ice cream in two days) but if they are paleo(-ish), what does it matter?

It wasn’t until I was sneaking an extra cookie ball from the fridge, I realized I am a little too ga-ga over sweets. Sure, there may be no refined sugars in these treats. They may be dairy-free. They may be made of a ton of coconut, chock full of amino acids and healthy fats. They’re nutrient-dense and pretty darn healthy!

But, I’m making a stupid substitution for something that I love (sugar sugar sugar!) and, more importantly, I’m lying to myself. These are not healthy; they may be healthier, but nothing about chocolate chips (dairy free or not) screams, “This is a miracle food and is doing my body good!!!”

Time to reset my mind and my body.

Thanks to this post by the Civilized Caveman himself, I’m doing this “detox”. (I still hate that word!) If anything, it will be a fun little challenge and a good way for me to introspectively take note of how dependent on sweet, sweet sugar I am, even though for over 6 weeks now I have only had refined sugar 2 or 3 times. Needless to say, it will be interesting!

It seems like Mr. Caveman is doing it for 22 days and many of us who are doing it with him are going to start tomorrow, but I’m starting today. Starting things on Sundays has always made mental sense to me. Fitness/training programs, food challenges, etc. – it just works better for me to start on a Sunday.

So this morning, I hit my reset button. I ate bacon, two kinds of sausage, and two sunny-side eggs. I drank my iced coffee on my (very downhill!) walk home with the boyfriend. Honestly this isn’t much different than what I’m already doing; however, there are some things that I need to do later. When I finish this post, I’m going to put the rest of those cookie bites in a Ziploc bag and put them in the freezer for the next 3 weeks. When I get my CSA box later today, I’ll be freezing the peaches and berries I expect that I’m getting. One thing I know I’ll need to do is still eat some carb-heavy veggies. Despite that bit of uncertainty, luckily there is a “for athletes” section in the manual for me to refer to!

It’s just 21 days. 3 weeks. I can easily do this by then, and I have a feeling my body will thank me for it. Come Labor Day weekend, I will be able to eat a slice of watermelon if I’d like to! But until then, I’ll just have to suffer through eating lots of fish, poultry, meat, and veggies… oh no!*

* Sometimes I wish sarcasm could be conveyed easier in the written/typed word!