21 Day Fix Extreme, One week down!

I finished one FULL week of my 21 Day Fix Extreme challenge! I want to give you a little recap of how it went. Day one was great. Day two I got hungry. Day three I got REALLY hungry. Day four I felt like I was going to pass out. So I decided to reevaluate what I was doing. I ended up using MyFitnessPal to calculate the actual calories I was consuming and even though I was eating EVERY container allotted to me, I was barely breaking 1000 calories in a day. NOT cool. So, I decided to move up to the next level which allows me to have one more purple (fruit), one more yellow (grains), one more green (veggies), and two extra teaspoons of oils or nut butters. BEST DECISION!!!! I have so much more energy. I'm so glad I listened to my body instead of trying to stay strict to the program.

Other than that slight hiccup, here's what I can tell you about the program so far. All of the workouts have been HARD. I typically do cardio and HIIT workouts, and occasionally throw in some weights. These workouts use weights pretty much the whole time so you get a mix of strength and cardio. I don't burn as many calories as I'm used to, but I'm going to trust that she knows what she's doing and I'll see results anyway. Every day I've been sore in new places and I can tell I'm targeting areas that I'm not used to working out, so that's good. The great thing is that they are only 30 minutes long, so even though I have to push really hard, it's over quickly.

All of the recipes I've made from the book they provide you with have been awesome. Everything tastes great. The beef/butternut squash stew is my favorite so far (I ate it so fast I didn't get to snap a picture of it). My husband agreed that it was better than my old stew recipe! I've been eating small portions throughout the day. I am a big snacker, so having smaller meals and lots of snacks is helpful. For some reason yesterday, I was REALLY hungry again, so I added in some extra protein and veggies so that I wouldn't be tempted to binge on something unhealthy. Overall I got about 1600 calories yesterday, which is almost 200 more than I'm supposed to have, but I figure that one day won't undo the rest of the week.

Here are some of the recipes I've tried:

Turkey lettuce wraps, one green and one red container.

This is a "mini egg cup" from her recipe book, I just like to cut mine up and put it on a piece of sprouted grain toast. The great part is I can eat TWO of these as breakfast. Two mini muffins equal one green and one red and the two pieces of toast count as two yellow. Filling and delicious. And did I mention COFFEE is allowed!?

I've been doing salads for lunch with baked chicken breast and I've made two of the dressing recipes from the recipe book. Both were very tasty. I've also found I can use half an orange container of dressing and use the other half for pumpkin seeds! This is one green, one red, one blue, and one orange.

This was my own recipe of spaghetti squash with meat sauce, one red container, one green container, and one purple container.

 

And this is the turkey meatloaf from the recipe book. This was really good and filling and the potion size is great. I had mine with sweet potato and broccoli. This meatloaf is one red, 1/2 yellow, 1/2 purple. Then my sides were one yellow and one green.

I also have to admit that I'm cheating in one small way. I'm adding about 1.5 teaspoons of honey to my plain Greek yogurt and I don't even care because no matter how much fruit you add to it, PLAIN yogurt tastes horrible. It's about 8 grams of sugar, but I'm willing to do that instead of gag through a snack.

So, week one is in the books. I have been tempted to have beer, wine, and candy and I've resisted! I don't feel bloated at all and I've lost 1.6 lbs. Which is a great healthy loss in my opinion.