14 days clean eating challenge to get in shape for summer

Today we're starting a little clean eating challenge that will last 14 whole days.

14 days!!!!

Our record until now is about 4 hours, but 14 days sounds simple, right? We guess not, but we'll do our best.

We need to get in shape and guess why?

That’s right, somebody’s going on a vacation and is having a little panic attack. But just a minor one. Not that we wake up in the middle of the night drown in sweat breathing heavily because we dreamed of a whale in a swim suit with our face on it.

No. This has never happened to us.

And as fun as this sounds, we are starting to feel the pressure. But starting today we are going to be clean eating all the way. From now on, we will wash all our vegetables and fruits.

Just kidding. We never wash anything.

We eat pretty clean most of the time, but lately it’s been quite weird. And we started eating half. Half. Like half the time clean – half the time pizza. Although we do not consider pizza unclean. We consider it heavenly. Nothing’s better than a pizza.

Aside from eating cleaner than a toilette in a fancy hotel, we will be doing some exercises. We do them mostly anyway, but the last weeks we have not been persistent – so this is our chance to step it up before we put our body on display at the beautiful beaches in Spain.

If you’d like you are welcome to join us at this challenge – sharing recipes and ideas. Here’s what we've planned.

FOODS TO INCLUDE

Our solid diet consists of whole foods that provide lots of fiber, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory factors, vitamins, minerals, proteins and healthy fats.

This means mostly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts, seeds and fatty fish.

All these foods are of course also good for the skin, as they provide the nutrients and the anti-inflammatory and antioxidant factors for a smoother healthier skin.

FOODS TO AVOID

Avoiding foods is truly not our style, but during these 14 days we wanna try. After all we want to have the maximum benefits from our clean eating.

Besides clean eating means cleaning out the crap out of your diet, right?

For us crap equals:

• coffee
• alcohol
• any sugar besides honey
• any processed grains
• meats
• junk food

A little cheese here and there is ok, we can’t live without cheese.

Basically we'll avoid anything that dries out our skin, makes it break out and puts a fat ring around our belly.

HOW OFTEN

We don’t like this question, but we'll answer it, mkay?

Let’s just say we will only eat when we're hungry. There’s no real rule to that. Some people say you should eat 4-6 times a day, but it depends on the meal size.

The rule that works best for us is: If we don’t feel hungry – we don’t eat yet. Even if it’s breakfast time.

That’s it.

UNTIL WHEN

We'll try to have our last meal for the day at least 3-4 hours before going to bed.

We don’t know how it happens, but when it gets later in the day some monstrous voice in our head tells us to eat unhealthy things. And eat more of them. Even if we've mastered our diet during the whole day and ate ONLY healthy stuff. We don’t know whose voice it is – but we hate it, it’s annoying.

Also eating late disturbs sleep, which in turn also makes us fat, cranky and sick.

So by deciding here and now, that we won’t eat past 7 (we go to sleep at 10, grandma-style we know!) we will simply not do it and this will solve our biggest problem with overeating crap.

Deciding in advance is the key to stop doing something you want to quit.

SAMPLE MENU

We're not a big planner and we never follow plans, especially food plans – there’s always some surprise here and there.

But for this challenge we think every day we will include a healthy drink – maybe something like a smoothie, a breakfast bowl or maybe healthy pancakes, some healthy snack like this one for example, a salad and another main meal which we will decide spontaneously about.

EXERCISE

Exercise will be daily and will include a daily run, a short yoga flow and strength exercises all in maximum 1 hour, but we'll try to fit them into less, because time is ticking for everyone, right?

As we like to get this all done in the morning before we start doing anything else, now we're wondering how we'll spend our evenings without being able to overeat or drink alcohol.

We'll have to find another hobby.

SOCIAL MEDIA UPDATE

It’s almost like when we were children and had these little paper pieces that smelled good. All the parents said there were drugs in them, but we kids shared them anyway among each other. Quite like social media. We guess we’ll never grow up.

Since 3 days social media has taken over all our life. Seriously. How do people do it? Are you online all the time? How do you guys manage that?

It’s quite overwhelming.

See you here and there and stay tuned for countless recipes this week and updates on the challenge.