Smoothie Reset Diet? We're Trying It!

Neon green smoothie dinner. Tasty.

I can't get behind cleanses and fad diets. They are too restricting and do nothing for you in the long-term. Plus, Nick and I are horrible people when we're hungry and can't deal with starvation in any form. Not like that works anyhow...

However, my pal Jenny told me about an easy and flexible five day "cleanse" or body reset diet that wasn't insane. It's from Harley Pasternak, who is a celebrity trainer but offers a reasonable way to get a kick start to your healthy eating habits over 15 days. It's simple to follow and does not seem to have the crazy fad diet effect like yo-yo diets and cabbage soup diets can create where you swing from being incredibly famished and binge once your diet has concluded. Juicing can be delicious but it takes away a lot of the most nutritious parts of fruit or veggies and leaves water and sugar. With smoothies, you get the whole part of fruits and vegetables including all of the fiber.

We're not going to follow it exactly but instead break it down in five-day increments with a couple of loose days due to family being in town and wedding cake tasting which is an evil, delicious necessity.

How it works

You start off your first five days replacing your three meals a day with smoothies. You also eat two small snacks during the day. Each smoothie meal and snack needs to encompass a combination of fiber, protein and healthy fat. You get to eat throughout the day and you can drink plenty of zero or low calorie drinks like tea, black coffee, water, Vitamin Water Zero, etc. After that, over the next five days, you'll replace one of your smoothie meals with a healthy non-smoothie meal and then incorporate traditional healthy meals so you're down to one smoothie a day by the end.

This reset diet does require some prepping like making breakfast smoothies the night before if you don't have time in the morning, packing lunch smoothies and snacks but you don't really have to spend time cooking or preparing complex meals the first week. The book contains simple recipes for healthy meals later which can be prepped or prepared in advance; however you can create your own healthy meals once you understand the strategy he provides for creating healthy smoothie or food recipes.

So what did Nick and I have the first day?

• We started out the day with a white smoothie - basically a smoothie of white-colored fruit. Our first meal was a riff of the "Apple Pie Smoothie": a smoothie made of soy milk, nonfat Greek yogurt, apple, banana, a little almond butter, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.
• For a midday snack, I packed us some smoked salmon, a dab of Greek yogurt spinach dip and cucumber sticks.
• I packed us thermoses of "Peanut Butter and Jelly" smoothies which is one of our favorites. It has banana, frozen strawberries, peanut butter, soy milk and some Greek yogurt - although you can use some protein powder instead of the yogurt. This encompasses a red smoothie which has red fruit like berries which are packed with fiber and antioxidants.
• In the afternoon, I noshed on red bean chips while I had made for Nick a savory snack of nitrite-free pastrami slices and lots of pickles.
• We enjoyed a tropical green smoothie for dinner: tons of spinach blended with a banana, mango, coconut water, nonfat Greek yogurt and a sprinkling of chia seeds.

You can find out specifics of the diet in this article. You can also get the book, which I downloaded to my Kindle to easily refer to recipes.

Week 1: How did it go so far?

• First of all, we feel lighter. We are definitely eating more fruits and vegetables than we typically do since we're having healthy things at each meal. I usually don't eat very much fruit at all but my mother would be thrilled to know I'm having apples, pears, and tons of berries instead of just bananas.
• Nick and I don't get hungry during the day. The smoothies and snacks kept us satisfied. It was a little difficult varying the smoothies and snacks although I got pretty creative with different snack options and there are some good, packaged, healthy snack options like some of the Kind Bars or Cruncha-Mame crunchy peas.
• You have to measure our your portions. Nick wants to eat bigger snacks but snacks need to be around 200 calories for him and around 150 calories for me. This means he gets generous portions of crudité with hummus but only a small bit of high fiber, whole grain Kashi cereal and milk for another snack. Boys usually do not follow the appropriate portion of cereal; they tend to want to eat giant, hungry-man bowls.
• We are ravenous in the late evening. Nighttime seems to be a struggle with us as we get hungry for something a little more substantial around 8-9pm. Most of the time we drink some tea or maybe have a few carrot sticks or nuts if we're ravenous but we've resigned to mostly heading to bed a little on the hungry side.
• I ran out of energy towards the end of the week. I was struggling to stay awake in the early evening on Thursday even with a decent amount of sleep and took a long nap Friday evening at 6:30pm! I wasn't necessarily hungry but I was exhausted. My fatigue was greater than the usual tiredness I would have from a long week at work or one poor night's sleep and I'm not sure I can attribute it to anything other than the diet.
• Our taste buds were reset! We had a couple of cake tasting appointments after a week of healthy eating and everything tasted too sweet. Each bite of cake or dessert was almost overly sweet for our adjusted taste buds and we didn't feel our best after consuming so much sugar.

At this point, we are thrilled to be able to incorporate solid meals along with our smoothies. We're going to try to stick to this reset diet as best as we can and see where it takes us.

It's a New Year! And We Have a Wedding to Slim Down For

Have you watched TV after January first? You are bombarded with countless commercials every time you turn on the TV; there are endless annoying ads featuring weight loss supplements, fit people jogging on treadmills to sell a new kind of gym membership, liposuction clinic deals and Jessica Simpson campaigning for Weight Watchers now that she's finally not pregnant again.

Ugh. New year resolutions are often filled with empty promises and weight loss is often the least successful of them all.

We've discussed eating healthy before on this blog, like when I shared how awesome zucchini noodles are. Nick and I are actually pretty healthy eaters; we get plenty of vegetables and kale, eat stuff like quinoa, wild-caught salmon and try not to keep junky snack food around like chips, cookies or ice cream. But we love food so much that we do tend to try new restaurants all of the time, partake in some eggs benedict at a cute brunch spot and order pizza or Thai food after an exhausting day at work. We're not unhealthy eaters but the inner fat kid in us is never afraid to indulge, which is fine for staying healthy or maintaining your weight. It's just not realistic for weight loss. And that has been our downfall, especially now since the wedding is closer than ever and we feel the pressure to dial up the slim down efforts rather than do the occasional workout or being complacent with the sporadic Molly Moons run.

Nick and I are going to make a concerted effort to try to lose weight for the wedding which will include much healthier eating, restricted calories and regular exercise. We can resume our normal eating habits afterwards. We're sharing our experiences, recipes and steps with you just to see how it will work out - and we would like you all to keep us accountable. Nothing we will do is dramatic; I am not a fan of the cycle of fasts and lemon juice cleanses that we encounter only to gain twice as much weight back again. Perhaps what we learn will help you or inspire you or simply amuse you.

Happy New Year!