Day 9 & Beyond - What Went Wrong...

So what happened after day 8?  Day 9 was going great, we stuck to the clean program for most of the day.  However, that night after consuming our smoothie we decided we had to eat something else.  Lunch that day was not good and I think we were both just hungry.  I know I personally only consumed half of my lunch.  Rather than deciding to make something from the clean program and just having two clean meals (which would have been the smart thing to do) we went out and ate pizza and bread sticks.  We then followed that up by a trip to the store where we continued to go down hill buying not one, but two packages of oreos and ice cream.  The next day we found ourself eating fast food and buying cupcakes (ironically enough after going GNC to buy more supplements).  Then last night at 9:30 pm we ordered a pizza, wings and bread sticks.  Needless to say we fell off the wagon and slid down hill out of control.  At the end of the day we failed to reach our goal.  I say failed on purpose because by failing we can learn what went wrong and fix it.

I have a couple of observations I now want to share.  My first comment is immediately after eating the first non clean food I felt different.  That foggy head feeling thats hard to describe but that we so often experience came back and my vision got a little blurry.  I've also noticed over the past several day my energy level has fallen back to what it was prior to clean where I'm always exhausted, something I didn't experience on the program.  I have also gained some weight, although surprisingly little considering how much crap we have eaten and my face is starting to get puffy again.  This past week while we have been eating terrible things for dinner we did stick to the smoothies in the morning, our supplements, and eating a lunch from the clean menus.  We also continued to leave the 12 hour window between meals (last meal/first meal of the day), although it was hard today not to eat anything until 10:30 am.

So why did we fail?  I've been thinking about this for the past few days and I have a come up with a handful of reasons.

• We thought this would be really easy.
• We didn't really think about our cravings and examine why we had them.
• Will power is not unlimited, if you don't allow yourself anything, eventually it will run out.
• We went to the regular store (it is surprisingly stimulating when you are used to shopping at places that do not carry highly processed food in colorful packaging)
• We used each other to justify cheating rather than why we should stay on the program.
• About half of the recipes we tired were not good.  This becomes a big deal when you only eat one solid meal a day.  
• I don't think we were consuming enough protein.
• Maybe we aimed to high saying we would do all three weeks right out of the gate rather than saying we will start with a week and then go from there based on how we felt.

There are probably other reasons as well, but these to me are the big ones.  I really think the biggest problem was we just jumped into the program, thought it would be a breeze and thought we knew better than doing everything he recommends and that we could will away our cravings.  I would also recommend for anyone who may consider doing this that you give yourself time ahead of starting to try out a lot of the recipes.  This way you will really love what you are eating when you are on the program.  Like I said, if you only have one solid meal a day you better like it and want to eat it.  When you don't like it and don't eat most of it you just end up hungry and craving all the things you shouldn't have.

So what are we going to do now?  Well we have talked about it and we are going to try again.  We will actually be starting tomorrow.  We are taking everything we learned from our failure and using it to make sure this time we will be successful.  We are eliminating the elimination diet phase though.  We were seeing benefits on the clean program and I still fully believe it is worth doing.  So stay tuned, tomorrow will be Clean Day 1, Take Two!