Here it is everyone The March Challenge is about to begin. Let me go over it again. This is voluntary from start to finish, but I promise it has the potential to change your life and your families if you choose to undertake it.
If you choose to take this challenge the only mandatory part is No Bread, Grain, Pasta, Rice, Oats, and NO SUGAR (real or artificial). The optional parts are food logging and weigh ins. It doesn’t matter if you do Zone or Paleo or something else. There are no penalties, no chastising, and no burpees if you cheat.
Read the ingredient list on everything. Be aware of your foods and choices. make smart decisions and plan ahead.
I want you to use this post to communicate with each other ask for recipes and help. I will post some recipes and links on this site as well as I will try to post a video or recipe every day of the month to help you out.
I want everyone who is doing the challenge to post their name to the comments section of this post and let us know that you are in. If you quit at some point post that you are out.
Who Is In?
paleofood.com
thepaleodiet.com
mypaleokitchen.blogspot.com
zonediet.com
the-zone-diet-recipes.com
433zonediet.com
Here is a website I found tonight that I found helpful.
http://olsonnd.com/30-sugar-free-days/
I’m in!
I’m in along with my husband, Tony.
Last night and this morning I have been researching what sugar does to our bodies and I am getting very excited for this challenge.
This morning I am actually having coffee without my toxic sugar-free vanilla creamer and you know what …. it’s not that bad. That is a huge break through for me guys!
I’m in! We are all gong to have rocken bodies!! Look out!! Love you guys, we can do this!!
I’m in…
Last night Janet and I cleaned out our pantry cabinet. What an eye opener that was. We had lots of junk!!!
I’m in too! wish you were still doing the burpee thing…that would’ve been fun and a good motivation
We are in…
I’m in. In reference to Shelly’s post, once you learn to like coffee black, you will find that amber (and stronger) beer tastes better, too! Definite benefit, but I guess I’ll have to stick to wine this month.
I’m in…Tammy are u in for this gr8 challenge??
We are in and ready to go. Meals all prepared for the week….lots of fruits and veggies, 8 chicken breasts with different seasonings, 3 pounds of ground turkey, a couple of steaks and we are good to go. It’s not that difficult guys…scrambled eggs and some of the ground turkey with salsa for breakfast…Please don’t make this harder than it is. We are only asking for 30 days. If after the 30 days is over and you want to go back to sugar, go for it. I’m betting things won’t taste as good as they used to and it’s going to make you feel like crap. But that’s the beauty of this challenge…we aren’t asking for a lifetime, we are asking for 30 days. I’m pretty sure it will change your life. Especially if you are an emotional eater like me. I have found that I don’t turn to the food anymore because I now see food as fuel and not comfort. Good luck to all and I hope everyone will at least give this challenge a try. Please ask us if you have any questions, we are here to help!
I’m in. Can’t wait to try out some new recipes!
The whole Wakin family is in. Please everyone don’t hesitate to ask and swap secrets we will all need it. I took a quick trip to Superstition Ranch Market on greenfield and main and they had a ton of deals. If you have any questions my e-mail is nickwakin@yahoo.com. Good luck to everyone. See you in the gym this week.
Try the Guacamole Devils Recipe that I posted a few weeks age. It really makes a great snack.
Breakfast seems to be the toughest part for people. Here are 2 recipes for Breakfast variations. I don’t have the zone blocks calculated for these, but they are less important than the quality of food.
Hot Nutty Cereal
Time: 10 mins
• 1 C almonds or pecans
• 1 medium sized apple, quartered
• 1 Tbsp cinnamon (This will help increase
insulin sensitivity)
• 1 C water
Makes 2 cups
Place all ingredients in blender and puree.
Pour into medium sized saucepan. You may need to
rinse the blender with an additional ¼ cup of
water to get all the cereal. Bring to a boil. Reduce
temperature immediately and allow to simmer
for 5 minutes covered. If thicker consistency is
desired, allow to simmer longer.
Frittata Fun
For a breakfast that can also serve as lunch, dinner
and snacks, a frittata is the way to go. Depending
on how you scale it, you can get 4-5 meals from
one of these relatively simple
beauties.
There is no end to the creativity that can be
applied here. Frittatas can be comprised of
virtually anything, so long as the wild combinations
you come up with appeal to you. Onions, garlic,
any type of meat, a variety of veggies and spices,
all can be thrown in to create a tasty frittata. The
one we are featuring is a simple but delicious
combination of lean beef, garlic, and green
onion. And of course, eggs!
When creating variations
of the frittata, be sure
to add slower cooking ingredients first, followed
by those that cook more quickly.
Note: For this recipe you will need a non-stick
skillet with a well-fitting lid.
Time: 30 minutes
• 8 oz lean beef
• 8 eggs
• 2 Cchopped green onion
• 8 cloves of garlic, chopped
• Dash of olive oil
Cut beef into small pieces and place in skillet
with
a dash of olive oil. Cook on medium
heat. Peel and chop garlic and add to the beef. Cook for
about 5 minutes. Add green onion and cook an
additional 2 minutes.
Mix the eggs in a bowl and
add to the skillet. Cover and immediately
reduce
heat to low. Cook covered until done (approximately
10-15 minutes) keeping an eye on the
center, as it will be the slowest to cook.
Zone blocks: If you are following the Zone, you
will want to construct the frittata according to
your block needs. The recipe above, when cut
into quarters, makes four 4-block meals, or three
4-block meals and two 2-block snacks. This is
perfect for someone on a 16-block plan. If you
think ahead a bit it becomes easy to construct
a frittata that will cover your block needs for the
entire day.
You will need to round out your meals with some
carbohydrates, as the frittata is primarily protein
and fat. The green onion and garlic are negligible
when it comes to overall carb content.
Hope this helps out. I am excited to see how many people are willing to do this. We will help each other all the way through this.
I’m in!!!!!
Since this was my last day before the challenge I went ahead and ate like crap and tonight I feel like crap for it.
I’m really looking forward to this challenge.
The recipes look really yummy, thanks.
I am in! I went shopping today and have my menu planned. I am looking forward to hearing everyone’s recipes and ideas
I’m in.
Dana and I are in! Not quite sure what I’m going to eat for lunch tomorrow, but I’ll find something.
Well Jason, you know you guilted me in the other day…though I do need a dispensation for the 17th, there will be much imbiding of fermented liquid grains in both whiskey and stout forms.
I’m ALL the way In!!! Krista thanks for asking I will did your help for sure. Darcy I know you have done very well on the Paleo before so I’m counting on you ladies to keep on my ASS instead of Jason. LOL!!
Bill is the best husband ever for some reason the good lord put Jason Speck into my life as my gym husband and I am so blessed to have him. Jason has a passion for fitness an health and he is so awesome at what he does. We are all lucky to have him. Sally I will never forget my first exercise I did (4 rounds of 100 ft. of walking lunges and I don’t know how many Fricken burbees) You got down and did those damn burpees with me on my final round and when I was finished I lost it. The tears just rolled down my face. I love you girl and I am soooooo lucky to call you my friend……. J I love you too but my love for you is a love hate relationship. LOL!! lets do this gang Jason says it will change our lives and I am sooooo ready for it!!!! 3 2 1 Go!!! see you all at the gym.
As you can see it’s late and I sooooo screwed up my post. I am so tired.. I just finished cutting and cooking and cutting and cooking and cutting and cooking proteins and veggies. I can say my fridge is full of food (good SHIT) this may be the first week my kids don’t have to eat cereal for breakfast and snack and dinner. Krista and Darcy I will really need your help. Thanks again Sally and Jason for being part of my life!!! I do love you guys dearly!!!
Good night!
I’m in too. Cleaned out my pantry and fridge, had a lot of crap. Then I went shopping for the healthy food. Never bought so many veggies and fruit at one time. Feels good we can do this!!!
So I prepped for this challenge yesterday (Sunday) by eating Lemon Ricotta pancakes from Wildflower for lunch and then having an entire large papa john’s pizza for dinner. I’m ready.
Awesome
I’m in:)
I’m in! It will be hard on spring break but I’m gonna do it!!!!
I am in!!
very excited to see the results of this challenge..
I’m in! Remember Sprouts honors both this and next week’s sales on Wednesdays.
Count me in
Jason I am in. See you later today.
For those of you who are using this challenge as weight loss, don’t forget to weigh in and log it in the front of your member booklet. We will weigh in once a week. This is NOT mandatory. There are some doing the challenge who don’t need to lose weight, they just want to get healthier!
I’m in.
any ideas on after school snacks i can eat?
I am in!! Sally and Jason as you know we have had our daughter Sarah on Paleo now for 6 months due to her type 1 diabetes. She is still in complete remission, requiring no insulin; we give complete credit to the Paleo diet and feel that the grains were/are at the root of her autoimmune response! So, Kirt and I are Paleo IN SARAHS PRESENCE but when we get away from her not so much!! So this is the month I stop running around behind her little back eating crap.
I cannot speak for Kirt
Cassie – Sarah eats fruit or almonds after school, or Boars Head (deli) turkey or ham.
I’m really hungry!! It hasn’t even been a day, I have a headache. : )
Please if you have any questions or if you have any doubts wether you can have something or not plase ask.
If you are feeling hungry eat real food. If it doesn’t look good to you or you don’t want it then it means it’s a craving.
I’m in and have had a great sugar free day so far! Yay!
I looked up: What does sugar do to your body. I know it’s lengthy, but here is what I found (I like that this guy compares it to a car engine):
This is an excellent question, and one that I think applies to almost everyone. In answering it, I’m going to give you a brief description of the biochemical events that take place when a person consumes sugar.
In explaining this subject to many people over a period of several years, I found the most useful metaphor to be that of an automobile engine. Let’s take a Toyota Corolla, one of the most popular cars on the street today. The Toyota Corolla has an engine that’s designed to burn a certain type of fuel. That fuel, gasoline, has a certain flash point and a given output of power per gallon of gasoline. There are other fuels that power other types of vehicles — for example, jets run on a high-octane petroleum product that has far more energy per gallon than automobile gasoline. Diesel fuel, on the other hand, burns more slowly.
So you have different types of fuels for different vehicles. Most people understand the idea that if you took your Toyota Corolla, drove it down to the airport, and filled it up on jet fuel, you wouldn’t get a faster Toyota Corolla. Instead, you would get a critically damaged Toyota Corolla engine, because the fuel would burn too hot, too fast, and it would overpower the design of the engine. In fact, you probably wouldn’t drive more than 10 miles before the engine burned up, and you would have to overhaul the entire engine in order to drive your car again.
This is sort of what goes on when it comes to the human digestive system and sugars. The human digestive system was designed to consume foods that are readily available in the natural surrounding environment. These foods can be compared to certain types of fuels because each food releases energy at a given rate during digestion (primarily based on fiber and fructose content).
As an example, let’s take a look at an apple. It contains fiber, vitamins and minerals, and lots of carbohydrates. The carbohydrates are the fuel. But the carbohydrates are bound up in the fiber of the apple so that it takes your body a fair amount of time and effort to release those carbohydrates and convert them into fuel. So you could call the apple a medium-burning carbohydrate, or in medical terms, it has a lower glycemic index than straight sugar.
But if you take straight sugar, that is, refined white sugar, which is something that does not occur naturally in the environment, and you put that in your mouth, then your body converts that into blood sugar very rapidly. It’s like pouring jet fuel down your throat. This is the same as filling up your Toyota gas tank with jet fuel and trying to drive away. When you eat sugar you consume soft drinks — which are even worse because they are liquid sugar — you are trying to run your metabolic engine on jet fuel, and the human metabolic engine was not designed to run on jet fuel.
So what happens? When you first consume any sort of refined sugars or refined carbohydrates (like white flour), the digestion process begins immediately — in fact, it begins even before you swallow the foods. There are digestive enzymes in your saliva that go to work on these sugars and start converting them into blood sugar, even before they hit your stomach. Once they’re in your stomach, they are mixed with acidic digestive juices and physically churned through stomach muscle contractions so that it creates a liquid paste. This liquid, sugary paste is then very easily absorbed through the intestinal walls, causing a rapid spike in blood sugar levels.
So your blood sugar, which might have been around 80 or 90 before you drank the soft drink or ate that candy bar, now suddenly starts spiking up to 150 or 200, or perhaps even higher. This creates an emergency situation in your body. High blood sugar is very dangerous for human beings. If it is allowed to continue, it will cause symptoms that are more classically known as diabetic neuropathy, which means the nerves that feed various limbs in your body (feet, mostly) start to die. Diabetics who maintain high blood sugar over a long period of time often have to have their feet amputated because the nerves in their feet are wasting away.
So…I happened to look on the labels of my toothpaste and mouthwash this morning and both contain ‘sodium saccharin.’ Probably going overboard by thinking about this, but just shows that sugar and artificial sweeteners are in EVERYTHING that has a label. I know Jason said that your brain recognizes the sweet taste as soon as it enters your mouth, so it seems like this (and gum) would be off limits even though we don’t swallow it.
There are a bunch of products out there without the sweeteners though. Guess I’ll have to make the switch.
)
Other than this it’s been a sugar free day!
Oooo, I want some bread or crackers so bad. I know it will pass, but I feel like something is missing; it is definitely an emotional attachment. I’m not even hungry.
Are we ALLOWED to chew Gum?
No Gum…
For the sake of those around you Please continue the Toothpaste and Mouthwash. The gum is a no though.
Mr & Mrs Henderson (Aka Barry & Ashley) are going for GOLD
I’m so in and so excited. I don’t think weighing in will benefit me though
as I will only be getting heavier the next few months. I’m know that this will help me feel better and not gain so much baby weight. I really hope that this will be a longer than 30day thing though. I’m really determined to change for good. Keep the recipe ideas coming!!
Here is a website that I found that has some good recipes http://www.paleoplan.com/recipes/ you can buy their service but it isn’t necessary.
1 day down 29 days to go!!!
anyone have any suggestions/recipes for salad dressing?
I have made an yummy dressing using the marinated artichoke hearts from Costco.
1 cup artichoke marinade
5 – 6 hearts
zest of 1 lemon
1/2 cup olive oil
1 1/2 tblsp. fresh dill, chopped
salt
ground pepper
mix all this in a jar and it should keep you in dressing for quite a few salads.