The Vegan Challenge

Okay friends, we have started our 30 day vegan challenge (and I’ll have you know right away that we are not die hard about it, there will be cheating). I will write about the challenges this type of eating style causes and talk about the positives. I’ll be honest about how well we do along the way. I’ll tell you right now that we’re traveling this weekend and I’m sure we’ll cheat. I don’t know any other way around it really. We’ll see. I’ll do about a post a week about it.

Here’s a before picture. This was our breakfast for Mother’s day celebration. It’s from a very popular spot called The Screen Door that does southern cooking at it’s best. One of their famous dishes is the fried chicken and sweet potato waffle. They go so overboard that they put three chicken breasts on top. Three!!! We ate two of them for dinner. We also tried the vanilla bean brioche french toast and biscuits and gravy. We took half of it home and enjoyed every tasty bite. I have to say though it made me feel gross for a couple days after.

Here are the rules, no animal based products are consumed. Oye.

Also, we haven’t been as strict with this diet with our kids. They are about half and half right now. Although they don’t have meat or normal milk. They’ve been getting soy milk and almond milk and they have all the vitamins they need in them. They haven’t complained at all yet. In fact, Jenna has eaten better than she ever has before and Isaac is doing really well too.

So here’s what we’ve had to eat so far for dinners: (All my recipes have come from Chloe’s Kitchen cookbook and I love it so far.)

Dinner 1: Avocado Basil Pasta with Artichoke antipasto on bread

Dinner 2: LA-Stlyle Chimichurri tacos (I used tofu in this, everyone ate it and Jenna loved the “chicken”)

Dinner 3: Best-Ever Baked Macaroni and Cheese and salad (I know, it says cheese and yet there was none. It was delicious and didn’t have the negative effects on my body. Amazing.)

Dinner 4: We’re doing wraps with hummus, sesame garlic tempeh, quinoa, spinach, avocado, peppers, and cucumber along with some tater tots.

Breakfast options: Oatmeal with craisins, almonds, soy milk, little brown sugar, granola, toast, English muffins, pancakes

Lunch options:, P, B &J, wraps (usually with humus, spinach, peppers, avocado, quinoa), or leftovers.

The food has been delicious and I haven’t missed any of the other stuff, well at least until I walk around and look at the restaurant menus and want a delicious piece of meat. I have to say we live in a great city to eat vegan because pretty much everywhere you go has vegan options.

I cheated the other day at the preschool picnic because I ate a cookie that I’m sure had eggs and butter in it. Oh well.

I just have to say that last week I ate pretty much all vegan (before our challenge began; Sort of a trial run to see if I could even do 30 days) and then over the weekend and through Tuesday morning I ate whatever I wanted, we ate out a few times for Mother’s day and while at the beach and I have to say, I felt pretty bad. I can already tell a difference in eating healthier and I wish that I could say there was no difference at all but I’m afraid that won’t be the end result of these 30 days.

So there you have it. The beginning of the challenge. We’ll see what the next week brings.