Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Dinner

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Dinner

November 20, 2013 by · 1 Comment

OK! You have almost made it through your day and just have 2 meals left! Here is how dinner and your late night snack go. Make sure you have been drinking an annoyingly large amount of water! Make sure to drink a glass with each of these following meals and one at the end of the day. Water will help flush your system. We all need a little reminder sometimes.

Also a little word of advice from past experience, don’t drink Spark after about 2:00 p.m. If you are using Spark I would make sure you don’t drink any for dinner or later in the afternoon. We do sometimes workout in the afternoons and we will still take the Catalyst about 15 minutes before a work out, if you are taking that it is still OK to take in the afternoon.

DINNER

Timing: Should be about 3 hours after your afternoon snack to help control hunger.

Advocare products to take: Take 2-4 Omegaplex tablets WITH this meal. Drink lots of water!

What you can eat for Dinner:  This is basically exactly like lunch. If you can make it without the complex carb that is the BEST for weight loss on The Cleanse, but if you need it eat it. You will be fine!

Choose 1 protein from this list: Grilled chicken, salmon, tuna, turkey (not processed), 3 eggs or lean ground beef

Choose 1 complex carb (only if you need it) from this list: ½ cup of brown rice, sweet potato, or brown or whole wheat pasta

Choose as many veggies as you would like: Anything green is your first option and yes avocado is ok. Lettuce, broccoli, zucchini, green beans, asparagus, spinach, cucumber or celery. Also tomatoes and onions are OK.

*If making a salad use salsa or fresh lemon and lime.

 

LATE SNACK

This is only if needed! You do not have to eat this if you are feeling fine! Just listen to your body.

Timing:  varies but hopefully about an hour before bedtime or more.

What you can eat: Fruit. 1 serving

The lower on the glycemic index the better! Think berries, cherries, apples, pears, grapefruit, apricots – these are all lower in sugar.  If you go with melons, mangoes, papayas, pineapples – these are all higher in sugar.  They won’t ruin your cleanse at all and they are obviously healthy, but if you think about it go less sugar for the 10 days.

 

RIGHT BEFORE BED:

Take your Herbal Cleanse Pills on days 1-7 with a HUGE glass of water.

You are done! Sleep tight!

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Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Lunch

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Lunch

September 30, 2013 by · 4 Comments

If you look back at the breakfast post then you will know how to make it to the 3rd meal of the day. We will combine the 3rd and 4th meal of the day together because that just makes it a little easier to understand.

What you would need to take from Advocare:

Advocare Products used during this time are both optional. Let me repeat: Advocare Products used during this time are both OPTIONAL. If you want to take something  you would take up to 3 catalyst 30 minutes before lunch.  You could also take a spark drink with lunch or with your after lunch snack. Both optional, but we wanted you to know you have that choice. Some people also take up to 2 Omegaplex, take either here or at dinner. That is up to you and will not mess you up if you alternate or switch.

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Lunch Food options:

Choose 1 protein from this list: Grilled chicken, salmon, tuna, turkey (not processed), 3 eggs or lean ground beef

Choose 1 complex carb from this list: ½ cup of brown rice, sweet potato, or brown or whole wheat pasta

Choose as many veggies as you would like: Anything green is your first option and yes avocado is ok. Lettuce, broccoli, zucchini, green beans, asparagus, spinach, cucumber or celery. Also tomatoes and onions are OK.

*If making a salad use salsa or fresh lemon and lime.

Afternoon Snack:  Choose 1 thing from below

1 cup of fruit (same list from breakfast)

Serving of nuts (same list from breakfast)

1 Rice cake and peanut butter

Raw veggies (as much as you want)

food photography of ripe fruits at the market

 

Things to avoid:

• Alcohol (You’re on the Cleanse – hold off for 10 days!)

• Coffee, Sodas, Energy Drinks (only drink Spark or Slam)

• White foods/Starches (e.g. white pasta, bagels, white bread, white rice, processed foods, crackers and chips)

• Sauces

• Cooking with Oils (it is best to cook with Water or Broth)

• Sugar, Honey, Desserts- (except for fresh fruits – these are good sugars on the 10-day Cleanse)

• Cheese & Mushrooms (both are “molds” and will help keep toxins alive)

• If at all possible, avoid Dairy Products (cow’s milk, yogurt, butter, etc…dairy products contain lots of sugars and will feed the toxins)

• Fatty Foods, Fried Foods, Fast Foods, Meat with skin or breading

• Salad dressings (due to the fat and oil content – use Salsa or fresh squeezed lemon juice and spices instead)

• Canned fruit or vegetables

• Dried fruit coated with sugar

• Instant rice or oatmeal (cook the real deal)

Things we have eaten:
• Amazeballs a.k.a. Clean Eating Meatballs

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• Southwest Quinoa Salad

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• Vegetable Tuna Salad

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• Chicken Taco Meat Salad

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• Green Chili & Vegetable Soup

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• Stuff Bell Peppers

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• Tosca Reno’s Slow Cooker Mexican Chicken

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Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Breakfast

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Breakfast

September 17, 2013 by · 6 Comments

We get tons of questions about how exactly to do the Advocare 10 day Cleanse and typically it is just about the food choices one should or should not be making.

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It seems to range from What the heck can I eat? to Can I actually eat anything? as well as timing and really anything else you can think of we’ve probably been asked it! 🙂  Trust us we’ve been asked some crazy questions which we actually love!  It has helped us learn a lot more and get that much more knowledgeable!  In an effort to help YOU we wanted to share this information and perhaps make the cleanse easier.

Over the next week or so we will be breaking down each meal for you so that we can clear some things up for everyone and again, make it SO much easier!

Naturally, we thought we’d kick things off with breakfast – that makes sense right??

When you wake up:

  • Take the Fiber Drink (days 1 – 3 and 8 – 10) and Probiotic Restore (days 4 – 10) – drink a large glass of water
  • Optional: Drink a Spark for energy and take catalyst before eating
  • Thirty minutes later (don’t freak out – you will not ruin it if you do eat in that range of time) eat breakfast.

Timing:

Wake up, immediately take the fiber drink, wait 30 minutes (or just get ready for work), eat your first meal after the 30 minutes, wait approximately 2 hours and then eat your second meal of the day.

What to eat:

This can get a little confusing because the Cleanse says to eat 5 to 6 small meals a day.  The first two small meals I like to just refer to as “breakfast” and will often times swap the order out depending on how I feel so the options below would work for your first two meals of the day (Advocare refers to this as “breakfast” and “mid-morning snack”).  These are in order of preference on the Cleanse for weight loss:

1. Bowl of fruit of your choice (about a cup to a cup and a half)

  • the lower on the glycemic index the better! Think berries, cherries, apples, pears, grapefruit, apricots – these are all lower in sugar.  If you go with melons, mangoes, papayas, pineapples – these are all higher in sugar.  They won’t ruin your cleanse at all and they are obviously healthy, but if you think about it go less sugar for the 10 days.

2. Meal replacement shake.

  • Advocare has a replacement shake, but if you have a favorite you already use then you can use that.

meal rep shake

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  • Be creative! We do protein with a mixture of fruits and veggies with water.  Sometimes we use a little bit of unsweetened almond milk, but this is not the *best* as some people stall with weight loss using milks so it’s not ideal.
  • Spinach, celery and kale all lose their flavors when mixed with fruit! 🙂

3. Three eggs (cooked however you want, but try not to add to them with any oil or butter and do not be afraid of the yolk!)

  • Omelet with veggies (spinach, peppers, mushrooms, onion, tomatoes – it’s all OK!)
  • Pouched
  • Scrambled
  • Hard-boiled
  • Make egg cups with veggies

4. Plain oatmeal (limit carbs like this to 1 time per day)

  • Do NOT go to Starbucks or the drive through at McDonald’s because they have convinced you this is a healthy choice – it’s fully of sugar!  We are talking PLAIN oatmeal with an emphasis on the PPPLLLAIN.  This means made at home, you control the intake, plain oatmeal.  If you must add things stick to fruit, stevia or cinnamon.

5. Nuts (2 ounces, we would also say stick with tree nuts, i.e., macadamia nuts, brazil nuts, cashews, almonds, walnuts, pecans, pistachios, chestnuts, beechnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, gingko nuts and hickory nuts)

pine nuts in cup in the shape of heart on sack cloth

 

Tips:

Do NOT over think this!

Eliminate all processed foods

Think protein before carbs

If it is not real food do not eat it

Drink TONS of fluids

Get a friend to join you!

It is only 10 days.  You will NOT die and you can add things back later that you might have missed so do not think we took all dairy from you for life or bread for that matter! Neither are the best for you, but you can have some back later.

Happy Cleansing!

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Cheaters, Cheaters, Pumpkin Eaters!

October 18, 2012 by · 3 Comments

If you saw our Wordless Wednesday post yesterday and you guessed that we cheated on our cleanse then CONGRATS you are correct!

Now pat yo’self on the back! 🙂

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We aren’t really ashamed to admit this because we are after all HUMAN.  We hopefully have mentioned before that it is really hard to find 10 consecutive days that work to cleanse.  We discussed a couple of different start dates before we determined October 8th would be the day for us, and now we can see where these 10 days got us.

Life happens much like with when you are trying to block out 16 weeks to dedicate to a marathon, and you might miss a training run or two.  Beth had 3 last minute Birthday parties to attend one of which also included Teal (hence where the cheating pictures came from). Every Wednesday the culinary art students at Teal’s school cook and last Wednesday all of the counselors were going to eat their food?  Yep, a Wednesday during our 10 day Advocare cleanse.

Despite the hiccups (a.k.a. cheat moments) the cleanse is still a good reset for your body!  We both still reaped benefits from it – Beth is 5 pounds lighter and Teal is 5 pounds lighter.  Not bad, right?

We are officially off of the cleanse though we both are trying to keep our eating habits similar to it as much as possible for the next 9 days! 🙂  We’ll be back tomorrow with our survival tips for the 10 day Advocare Cleanse.

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Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: What We’re Eating

October 16, 2012 by · 52 Comments

The cleanse is actually very easy to follow in terms of what you can and cannot eat, and once you have that down, making meals is pretty easy.

These are the bulk of what Teal will eat for the 10 days.

For Breakfast I am drinking Shakeology. Yes I am cheating on Advocare with this one and not using their meal replacement shakes. *gasp* I like Shakeology way more. Shhhh don’t tell them!

Here are the three main meals I made to mix in as either lunch or dinner throughout the time.

1. Southwest Quinoa Salad  ( 5 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $4.15

Ingredients: 1lb of chicken breast, ½ of a large red onion, one can of organic black beans, 1 cup of organic quinoa (technically this is 2 full servings and will be split over 5 meals), cherry tomatoes, spinach, salt and pepper to taste.

2. Vegetable Tuna Salad  (6 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $1.68

Ingredients: 3 cans tuna, ¾ cup celery chopped, ¾ cup carrot chopped, ½ of a red onion, 1 English seedless cucumber chopped, 2 tablespoons mayo. ( this is 2 servings spread over 6 meals so this is ok)

Serve over salad or use a cucumber and mini sweet bell peppers instead of crackers to eat! They crunch so you just have to trick yourself!

3. Soup:  have no clue what to call this because it’s like 2 recipes combined (6 servings)

Approximate Cost per serving: $3.45

Ingredients: 4-6 cups low sodium organic chicken stock, 1lb chicken breast, 1 can organic gazpacho beans, 1 can organic corn, 2 tomatoes diced, one small white onion, 2 green bell peppers chopped, cilantro, 1 jalapeño chopped, juice of 1 lime, cumin, chili powder, onion powder, salt, pepper, red pepper flakes.

Snacks if needed: cucumber, carrots, mini sweet bell peppers, raw almonds or cashews, tangerines, apples, almond butter.

And for Beth the bulk of what she will be eating is as follows:

1. Chicken Taco Meat Salad (5 servings)

actually ate it without quinoa most of the week, but that is something you can put in this salad for sure!

The chicken in this form really goes a long way for me and this is usually me getting 2-3 organic chicken breasts.  You might remember seeing this meat from a previous Tasty Tuesday post from us.

Ingredients: Organic chicken, 4 cups low sodium chicken broth, and 1 packet of low sodium taco seasoning for just the meat.  For the salad I did green bell pepper, cherry tomatoes, and spinach leaves.

Approximate Cost per serving: Yah, Brent and I split the groceries so it made our receipts weird. I’m the slacker here. :-/

2. Turkey Meatloaf (4 servings)

Ingredients: 1.5 pounds of 99% lean turkey breast, 1 cup chopped onion, 1 cup frozen spinach, 3/4 cup of salsa, 1 egg (or two egg whites), 1/3 cup of oats, 1 teaspoon of paprika, 1 teaspoon of ground mustard, 2 tablespoons of dijon mustard, pepper to taste and 2 tablespoons of worchestire sauce.

3. Mexican Chicken Lime Soup (6 servings)

Ingredients: 2 Tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, 1 onion (finely chopped), 6 gloves of garlic, 6 skinless, boneless chicken thighs cut into 1/2 inch pieces, 2 canned chipotle chiles in adobo sauce, 6 cups of chicken broth, 1/2 cup of fresh cilantro, juice of 2 limes, salt and pepper and 1 hass avocado.

4. Egg Frittata (6 servings)

Ingredients: a dozen eggs, 1/2 of one roma tomato, one squash, 1/4 of green bell pepper, 1/4 of red bell pepper, garlic and salt & pepper to taste.

There was also turkey taco meat but I figure a lot of people know that one already and overall made about 29 meals to split between myself and Brent.

With some preparation on your part you can make doing this advocare 10 day cleanse easy to follow! We’ll be back with a post on our tips to surviving the cleanse! 🙂

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Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Dos & Don’ts

October 9, 2012 by · 143 Comments

Maybe you’ve heard of the Advocare 24 Day Challenge?  Well, this 10 Day Cleanse is the first part of that 24 Day Challenge and you might have noticed when we have cleansed in the past we have stuck to really just doing the first 10 days of that challenge, so that is an option.  Here is a list of what you will actually need for this cleanse –

  • Box of the Herbal Cleanse

  • One bottle of Omegaplex
  • One bottle of Catalyst
  • Optional: Spark

Now let’s get into more of the nitty gritty of what your food should and should not be for the 10 days that you are on the cleanse –

Don’ts:

Refined sugars, corn or white starches

Wheat products (bread, pasta, muffins, etc.),

Dairy of any kind (milk, cheese, yogurt)

White sauces, dressings such as ranch, blue cheese

Alcohol (you can go without – it’s only 10 days)

Coffee (lattes and coffee full of milk or creamer definitely NO, but if you are a black coffee drinker then in our opinion you don’t have to stop drinking it.)

Soda

Fried foods

Hydrogenated oils, high fructose corn syrup

Fruit juices

Cereal

Bottom feeder seafood (shrimp, lobster)

Extremely small or low doses of butter, margarine, or mayo (ideally these are never used but definitely not on a regular basis)

Do’s:

Vegetables: Fresh or frozen are preferred over canned. Stick with more greens and avoid starchy vegetables like corn.

Fruit: look for fruits lower on the Glycemic Index, but a good rule of thumb is northern fruits: apples and berries. Oranges, grapefruit, pineapple, grapes, kiwi, and bananas are OK but keep to one serving.

Healthy Fats: avocado, nuts, olive oil, almonds, walnuts, hazelnuts

Meats: clean meats are best in the whole form, ground is OK, but not for every meal. Chicken, tuna, salmon, halibut, eggs, beef is OK, but is not the first choice, and turkey.

Clean Carbohydrates: sparingly during the cleanse –  Rice, hummus, oatmeal, quinoa, rice cakes.

Also OK: Lentils, legumes, fresh mint, lemon or lime juice, 100% cranberry juice to add flavor, egg beaters, mustards, relish, low mayo, pickles, spaghetti sauce with not added sugars (organic and clean) salsa.

What we both like about this cleanse is that it isn’t an unrealistic cleanse.  It is very doable and if you are trying to get rid of processed food from your diet this can very much aid you in that process.  To make this a successful cleanse try and do as much food prep early on so you don’t get in a bind later. Advocare recommends doing this cleanse once every 3 months.

Should you want to do the Advocare Ten Day Cleanse then you may go here to find all of your products.

Have you participated in a cleanse before, if so what kind? If not, what’s hold you back from trying one?

*all pictures courtesy of Advocare

**Disclaimer: Teal is an Advocare Distributor and became one because she believes in the product.  We are not being paid for writing this blog post, but want to share with you something we believe in ourselves.

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A Cleansing Recap

January 16, 2012 by · 12 Comments

Well, we did it! 🙂  We survived our 10 day cleanse!  This was really Teal’s 3rd time doing the Advocare cleanse since as we mentioned before she is a distributor for it.  A few years back a teacher colleague recruited a bunch of people to participate in the cleanse and that’s ultimately where Teal got started with Advocare.  If you’d like to purchase any Advocare products you can through Teal’s website.

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There is any additional Advocare product called Spark Energy Drink that is a recommended part of the cleanse that we left off.  As far as the pills and what not go with the cleanse it is broken up into 3 days, 4 days and 3 days.  You start your first 3 days by drinking a fiber drink each morning, take 4 to 6 of the OmegaPlex pills with your dinner and a packet of the Herbal Cleanse tablets at bedtime. For the next 4 days, wake up and take a packet of Probiotic Restore pills, take 4 to 6 OmegaPlex pills with your dinner and packet of Herbal Cleanse tablets at bedtime.  The last 3 days of the cleanse consist of the fiber drink in the morning, 4 to 6 OmegaPlex pills with your dinner and packet of the Herbal Cleanse tablets at bedtime.

Part of why we both wanted to do this cleanse was just to jumpstart back into eating right – you know kick off 2012 the right way!  It was kind of rough combination of coming off marathon training and then three weeks later Christmas where it’s too easy to eat and drink too much, so we were both ready for a fresh start.

A lot of people asked what are you allowed to eat on this cleanse?  Well, you are allowed to eat a lot of clean food!  You can eat fruits, veggies, proteins, and clean carbs.  So if you are a carboholic then there is a bit of a transition for you, but ultimately you eat in a way that you really should be eating regularly.  We both ate about 5 meals a day and here’s an example of the plan Teal mainly stuck with throughout:

Beth recruited two people she is around the most to also participate in the cleanse – her fiance, Brent and her sister, Kate.  It was definitely nice having other people who were doing the cleanse and to stay strong in not drinking and not eating anything that wasn’t on the list of approved food.  So when it came time to eat dinner with Brent’s family at Cheesecake Factory for his sister’s Birthday it was easier to stay strong in clean choices together than alone!

One thing to be said about the cleanse and working out – Advocare does recommend that you workout every day while participating in the cleanse but in your first five days you might want to keep from pushing yourself as hard as you would like because you might experience light headedness.  As your body adjusts to the difference in eating it will begin to adjust to your normal workout routine as well.

For Beth one aspect of the cleanse she really enjoyed was finding some healthy food options that are realistic to carry over past the cleanse.  One such item that can be prepared for the whole week would be chicken salad using chicken boiled in chicken broth with whatever seasoning you’d like, bell pepper, celery and Kraft Mayo with Olive Oil (reduced fat).

Overall, all four of us that participated in the cleanse feel better and it doesn’t hurt that all of us combined together lost a total of 32.5 pounds!  Teal dropped 5.5 pounds and Beth dropped 9 pounds.  Thanks to Kate and Brent for participating too and hope that the 9 pound drop each was well worth those ten days!  The cleanse is recommended every 90 days so in April you might hear about us cleansing again! 🙂

Have you done a cleanse before?  What keeps you going  back to cleansing? Or what keeps you from participating in a cleanse?

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