Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail!

Drinking my favorite: Carrot, Apple, Ginger

I’m really enjoying this journey so far. I feel like I’m learning about myself besides learning about food.  This last week started off bumpily. I’ve mentioned before that we’ve had some snow days up here and being stuck home all day is really tough when you’re not able to eat food. 

I spoke with Kasia, my nutritionist, and she basically told me to stop being crazy: I didn’t have to completely abstain from solids to be detoxing. I knew this already, I just wanted to try, and I wanted to see if I could challenge myself in that way. I made it a week but on day 8, I had about a cup or two of watermelon with dinner.  Kasia informed me that watermelon is excellent for detoxing and I shouldn’t feel bad about it.

An important part of a new diet is planning. I spent sometime this last week planning my meals for the upcoming week. One of my favorite mantras is:

Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail!

I say it to myself when I do fail to plan, or if I get lazy about it. It reminds me that if I want to eat well, I need to plan for it. Since I’m only just starting a plant-based diet for the first time, I really need to make sure I plan if I want to be successful and stay within my desired dietary restrictions.

I have a great planner I bought at the beginning of the school ear, but soon realized I don’t need to put any notes in the “daily” section so when I need I needed to plan meals out for the week… what better place!

I set aside some time and opened my laptop to find some recipes I want to create!  It is important to know your limitations, your likes and dislikes, your strengths and weaknesses and to know what you can handle before starting something new.  These are all things I’ve thought about before I started meal planning.

I’m Armenian and very proud and involved in my heritage and food and everything. Unfortunately for me, there are a lot of Armenian dairy foods that I love!  That being said, since Armenia was the first Christian nation, a lot of what we are about centers around our religion… Why am I telling you this? During Lent it is customary to “give up” something, but traditionally, Armenians gave up all animal products, essentially becoming vegans. There are so many Vegan friendly dishes that there’s actually a cookbook dedicated to it which we own, see where I’m going with this?

When you’re starting something new, make sure you incorporate things you know and things you will learn so you don’t get bored. I love all the vegan favorites so I know I can happily stay vegan and while I may miss cheese boreg, I can still eat vospov kuta!  I know that I will eventually get bored with just the Armenian recipes so I have researched and found (pinned!) a lot of recipes I would like to try.  I have planned a “salad” dish for my lunches and three to four dishes for dinners over the week depending on if we finish the leftovers sooner or later.

I’ve loved the way I feel drinking juice, so I’m planning on continuing with that, for breakfast, and maybe juices too.

Breakfast: Juice, piece of fruit

Lunch: Mexican themed Quinoa Salad (I’ll post my ‘recipe’ tomorrow)

Dinner: Mujadara, Leek stew, FOK Shepherds Pie, and maybe Cassoulet or Eetch

Snacks: Fruit, veggies, Juice, FOK Banana Blueberry Bars

The “FOK” recipes are recipes I found on the Forks Over Knives website or books.

I then went through to see what ingredients I needed for each recipe and made a shopping list.

From there I’ll be preparing some of the pieces to these meals tonight for the week. So far I feel great and I don’t feel deprived! I know why I’m doing this and I’m in it to win it!

Have you made any changes for your healthy recently? What are they?