A Better You V.4 A New Day of Eating = A New Way of Eating

I started the Clean Eating Challenge with Danielle who writes Sometimes Sweet. You can read about her challenge here. A few years ago, I made a change in my diet somewhat like the one we're doing now. I ate no sugar, yeast, or dairy. I did eat fruit, noodles and Ezekiel bread. Surprisingly this way of eating lasted me close to a year (I would of corse reward myself every once in a great while with a cupcake or something). The main reason behind eating that way was because I had a lot of infections going on in my body at the time. I did go to the doctor before all this and he gave me some anti biotic's but after taking them all as prescribed the infections were unaltered. I wasn't about to go back to get some stronger stuff when I didn't like taking them in the first place. I decided to make a big change and stick to it. After only a few weeks of removing those three things  from my diet, not only did the infections go away but my face acne disappeared completely, my eyes turned freakishly bright blue, my hair eventually grew longer than it ever had before and I never noticed dried ends. I always maintained a great weight, slept better and had more energy.
I've tried many, many times over the years to start start eating the same again, but it always ends up lasting me between 2 to 6 hours! Yep, not even a day. It's so hard for me to just drop sugar completely from my diet. It's like a drug! Right now I have an ear infection that's been lingering for the past couple of months and my face has been breaking out like non other. I knew I needed to do something about it, but with many failed attempts to resist scattered goodies around my house it hasn't working out. After reading Danielle's challenge I FINALLY got the motivation I needed. She keeps saying how amazing she feels after eating clean for just a week! This is day number 3 for me and I'm going strong. It's totally just the hump of the first two days that's hard. Every time I get tempted I just think, Hey, you did awesome with this yesterday, there's no way you can give up now! The first day felt like hell, but I'm SO thankful to myself that I got over it and kept going.
So, I'd like to challenge you. If you'd like to give this clean eating thing a shot, GO FOR IT! And tell me what you decided to change about the way you eat. Are you going to cut out carbs? Sugar? Are you going for the whole thing?! Here are a few tips for you if you decide to make a change:

• Sugar is sneaky! It can be in ANYTHING! spaghetti sauce, catsup, peanut butter... You have to read the ingredients on EVERYTHING to make sure. 
• If you decide to cut out fruit sugar too, but don't know about fruit altogether, grapefruit and green apples have the least amount of sugar int them.
• If you want to start replacing all the corn syrup and processed sugar sweetened things with fruit sweetened things, AWESOME! There are some great fruit sweetened things out there like, yogurt, catsup (yes they make fruit sweetened catsup!), cereal, jelly, the list goes on! 
• Don't forget that carbs turn to sugar in your body, but if you don't think you can't cut out all that, just trying to cut out things with yeast is great.  You can use ezekiel bread and ezekiel tortillas. They're a sprouted bread.
• If you mess up, don't worry! Tomorrow is a new day and you can start over. Just KEEP trying and don't give up. It's hard, I know! But The longer you go the easier it gets! 

Good luck, and I'd love to hear from you! xo -Liz

P.S. You should be able to find most of the things listed at your local health food store.
P.P.S. I'll be posting my clean eating meals these past few days, in the next day or two.