The Veggie Challenge

Last week Husband put a new documentary on our instant netflix queue for us to watch. He always picks the best ones. Anyways, last week we sat down and checked it out. It was called Forks Over Knives.

Forks Over Knives examines the "profound claim that most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting our present menu of animal-based and processed foods." 

It was very interesting and I personally like it. I'm not a film critic so I'm going to leave it at that. This film did however inspire us to challenge ourselves for the week. Go a week without meat and no fast food. 

We don't cook. After work we either go to a restaurant, fast food joint or my family would cook us dinner (meat was in every meal). So this challenge was exciting because we'd have to get to cooking. 

On the search for recipes I found two food blogs that I fell in love with: Sprouted Kitchen and A Couple Cooks. 

Sprouted Kitchen loves cooking tasty food with healthy ingredients and the photography on her blog is so good!

A Couple Cooks are a young married couple who share the food they cook and it's always simple and fresh. They believe everyone can cook if they can. Their pictures are also awesome. Pictures mean a lot when it comes to finding foods to prepare!

A couple of my favorite recipes we tried this week were:

Sweet Potato, Black Bean and Green Chile Enchiladas by A Couple Cooks

Farfalle with Tomato-Goat Cheese Cream Sauce from Vegetarian Times.

We've successfully completed our 7 day vegetarian challenge and here's what we've learned:

*If you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. There was one day where we made spaghetti and we felt like having bread with it but we ran out of bread. We did, however, have some garlic bread Texas Toast in our freezer. I looked at the ingredients before throwing it in our toaster oven and immediately got nervous. I could not pronounce half of the ingredients on the box! That should have been a red flag. Actually what should have been the red flag was that it was in a box in the frozen section. I should have immediately thrown it away but instead I threw it in the toaster oven. And as you probably guessed, we felt terrible after dinner. I was surprised after eating so well and natural after 4 days that the bread could have such a huge impact. But it did. And never again.

*I have more energy. After dinners before this challenge, I would get sleepy and not want to do anything. I've noticed that after eating dinners this week I felt energized and good! 

*We're not hungry. This week our breakfasts and dinners have been way smaller in proportion but guess what, we weren't hungry. Our veggie-filled meals left us feeling satisfied without feeling too full. 

*Your body adapts quickly to real food. Like I mentioned first, the one thing that wasn't real made us feel awful. 

I'm so happy we did this. We love doing challenges and this one was very beneficial. I don't know why I'm surprised that food makes such a huge difference in how you feel. We've both gained some weight in the past 2 years and doing this challenge helped us lose a few pounds this week. Bonus!

Have you seen Forks Over Knives? Do you ever do challenges to see if you can do it? Isn't pinterest awesome for finding recipes?!

Husband and I love doing challenges and I thought I would share this one with you. I think we're going to continue this one!