My husband showed me an article in Outside, an active-lifestyle/adventure-travel magazine. One of the editors had been challenged to a 28-day lifestyle change following Dr. Alejandro Junger’s diet Clean. I was very interested in this since I’ve been wanting to “clean” up my diet for 2011. All the coffee, diary and chocolate that had somehow creeped into it was sucking the energy away from my day-to-day life, messing with my digestive system and turning me into an addict.

I flipped through a lot of the pages from Clean on Amazon and looked up a list of recipes from the book on Gwyneth Paltrow’s blog, GOOP. (Love this blog, by the way.)

And this morning, I decided to take on a modified version of the challenge myself, in hopes of increasing my energy, getting better sleep at night and feeling better overall. I’m also curious to see if I can’t kick some of the back pain I experience from working in front of a computer all day.

Here’s what I’ve eaten today —
Room temperature, filtered water with squeezed lemon before breakfast.
Caffeine free herbal tea.
Blueberry, organic soy milk*, spinach, cocoa flavored whey protein smoothie. (Surprisingly so delicious).
Cantaloupe slices as a snack.
This huge, colorful salad for lunch and a side of humus.

(I ended up eating half of this raw and sauteed the rest on the stove until the spinach was soft. I love hot meals and couldn’t resist, but from what I’ve read of Junger’s diet, he allows for hot meals at lunch so I’m in the clear.)
For dinner, I’ll have another smoothie along with Udo’s Omega 3, 6, 9 oil blend capsules that I have had at breakfast and lunch too. The blend is made of flax, sunflower, sesame, coconut, evening primrose, rice germ and bran oils.

I hope I can keep this up so that I’m able to report back with my results. Day 1 down (almost), 27 to go!