THE JANUARY CHALLENGE

 

So the people who follow me on instagram could see me struggling in January with my so called Detox January month. I challenged myself to intergrate into the world of healthy lifestyle. How? By upping my 'diet', not with eating less, but eating healthier..

MY GOAL
My goal was to live healthier and totally cleanse my body from within. I of course wanted to lose a few pounds and, another factor that had been bothering me for a while is my skin. Since cleansing from the outside isn't the only way to get my skin to look more beautifully, I wanted to change something in my eating pattern and see what the result would me like

THE EXECUTION
Since I'm a student at Uni in Arnhem, and I originally live in Sittard (which is about 2,5 hours of traveling with public transportation), I live by myself in Arnhem for 5 days of the week, and during the weekend I return home to my parents in Sittard. This means that my detox diet hasn't fully been executed the way it is supposed to be executed. I detoxed for 4,5 days, and I fell back in more or less my regular eating pattern during the other 2,5 days.

During weekdays:
This might seem a bit strange, but when living all by myself, I have been able to really be strict for myself (don't buy any candy).I was actually forcing myself to drink more and eat healthier. This, for me, included eating more fruits and vegetables. For meat, I ate chicken, and if I didn't feel like chicken, I invested in some nice white fish (baked in coconut oil ofcourse) On other days I loved to eat salads as well. For lunch and snacking, rice waffles have been my true gems. For lunch I topped them with either some smoked chicken and tomatoes, or some cottage cheese with tomatoes some salt and pepper. For snacking, I also loved to eat nuts with dried cranberries. For breakfast I have been enjoying yoghurt with some biological Rice puffs, line seed and puffed quinoa. I sometimes topped that off with some banana slices. For drinks, I only had tea or water, with sometimes a cup of coffee to keep me focused during exam week. The kind of tea I drank was adapted to my diet as well. The only tea I drank was either green tea, white tea or detox tea and these were all biological. The difference (they say) with biological tea and your regular pickwick or lipton tea, is that pickwick and lipton infuse a sugar replacer into the teabags so that your tea will taste sweeter (and of course the bags are bleached). With biological tea, both of the above are not the case.

During weekends:
I tried to drink as much as I can, and I skipped eating candy and bisquits. However my healthy food didn't really appear in my mom's cooking, so I skipped out on this during the weekends. I have to say though, that our regular diet isn't unhealthy at all, but I just wanted to try something even healthier. Of course, you want to go out during the weekends, and drink a nice cocktail. I lately discovered my new favourite cocktail, and, lucky me, it's often called the 'Skinny Bitch'. It is basically vodka with sparkling water and a squeeze of lemon. I. Love. It.

THE RESULTS
And probably the most exciting part of today's blogpost is, what are the results after one month of mildly detoxing?

I must say, that I am rather pleased with the results. I actually lost a few pounds and my skin is starting to look better than it has done for a long while now. I am also way more interested in maintaining this healthier lifestyle and see how my body and skin keep on progressing. I also noticed that I got way more interested in cooking and food, and a healthy lifestyle!

TIPS
If you are interested in doing this yourself as well, than I would very much like to give you my three golden tips.

#1: Don't lose yourself:  By this I mean, keep eating as much as you like, and don't lose yourself in being really strict in a diet. See it as a challenge to cook really nicely, with better ingredients and to make the healthy stuff, the stuff you actually prefer to the unhealthier stuff.

#2 Read!  Read as many blogs and recipes as you can find. It will definetly inspire you!

#3  Be patient and motivated:  It is so easy to fall back into your old habits, but in order to succeed, you should find the motivation and inspiration to stick through, and I can guarantee you, you won't regret it!