My detox January

Hellooooo lovely hoomans!

(I’m trying a new greeting – how do you like it?)

So before you all comment saying ‘Tia, do you not own a calendar? It’s already March, why are we talking about January?’, there is method to my madness.

Because I’m only re-emerging in the blogging world now, I didn’t exactly get to write about January in January. I also went through a pretty interesting experience in January and it’s something I wanted to share with everyone so here we are in March, talking about January.

Sooooo what did I do in January you might be asking?

As the title suggests, I did a detox in January, which is quite a common trend. Because it’s the start of a new year, most people take January as the month to purge their life of bad habits, or try out some healthy new ones as part of their goals or resolutions for the year. But, what makes this one interesting is I may have taken it a bit overboard than a normal ‘detox’.

I’ve been on a rather long, somewhat turbulent and challenging weight loss journey for the last 6 years. I’ve done the dieting, extreme exercises, calorie counting, intermittent fasting and a raft of other things. After a while I tried to focus more on just creating a healthy attitude around food and exercise, and every now and then I try out a challenge to keep things interesting. I’m definitely in a much happier place about myself and food, but of course I still have goals I want to achieve so that’s why I used my detox January as the chance to push forward and keep progressing.

For my detox January, I decided to cut the following out of my diet:

• Refined sugar
• Alcohol
• Gluten
• Dairy

So yeah … I basically had a whole month mostly eating protein, fruit and vegetables. And soy yoghurt.

At first it started as just refined sugar and alcohol, because those aren’t exactly healthy anyway, but for health reasons I excluded dairy and gluten too and shockingly, I did feel much healthier after my detox month.

Surprisingly, the whole thing was much easier than I expected. The only temptations were when I was spending time with friends and they’d order pizza, or we’d all go out for drinks or dinner, and I’d be the person drinking water and nibbling carrot sticks (I swear sometimes they did it on purpose like bringing out the chocolate stash when we had movie night but I survived). It was easy enough to avoid alcohol, most sugar and gluten, but it was surprising how often dairy snuck into my diet. I had to find a lot of new recipes, but now I have a lot of fun new ones to include in my regular meal rotation. I also struggled with the occasional craving courtesy of my sweet tooth, but thanks to dates, gluten free oats, cinnamon and raw honey, I made some really delicious snack balls that got my sweet tooth back under control.

Sooooo why did I share this story, which is essentially a month of me trying my most extreme food challenge yet? Well, firstly because as I said it was an interesting, challenging experience and I wanted to share my journey on it, but also because it’s to tell all of you that if there’s something you want to try out, or a challenge you think you can’t do, don’t sell yourself short. Go for it! I did not think I would make it through the first week, but somehow I made it through the month, and more of my new eating habits have stuck than I thought. It only takes 21 days to make a new habit, and if you have the motivation (and a good support group that mostly doesn’t try ruin your resolve), I guarantee you can do it!

And there we have it – my first official post back! I hope you all enjoyed my detox story. I promise I’ll brainstorm something a little more up-to-date and funky than detox challenges for next week.

Until then, stay sparkly everyone!

Lots of love

Blondey on a Mission xxx