Advocare for the New Year {2015}

Advocare for the New Year {2015}

Happy New Year! We know it’s already several days into the new year, but now that everyone is getting back into a schedule we just wanted to put a reminder out there that we do sell Advocare.  If you are looking for a way to jump start your fitness goals this year then why not checkout the Advocare 10 Day Cleanse?

We’ve both done the cleanse several times and have tried to put together as much info as we possibly could to make it easier for you!

If you are looking for some recipes that we have used during the cleanse, well, those can also be found within our Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner posts.

If you’re looking for what days you should drink the fiber drink? When you should take catalyst? Well, those types of questions can also be found throughout the Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner posts.

Survival Tips – are you looking for how to survive those 10 days on the cleanse? Look no further than our survival tips post with tips like – Do the cleanse with a buddy to keep yourself accountable! Don’t worry there are more tips than just that! :)

We have also come up with our own list of Dos and Don’ts while on the cleanse. For instance DO eat all the water and DON’T drink alcohol! So sorry!

To bring this post to an end here are in list form important Advocare posts we have done that might be useful to you:

Advocare 10 Day Cleanse: Breakfast

Advocare 10 Day Cleanse: Lunch

Advocare 10 Day Cleanse: Dinner

Our Survival Tips

Dos and Don’ts on the Advocare Cleanse

Advocare 10 Day Cleanse: What We Are Eating

Please remember that mistakes do happen if you happen to eat something you shouldn’t, well, just don’t keep eating it. Once you realize that you ate something not approved for the cleanse then stop eating it and waiting until the cleanse is over to have it again.

It is hard to be 100% accurate with these types of things so we normally suggest using the 80/20 rule which means you need to make sure your eating is on point 80% of the time and if you mess up well don’t let that percentage be more than 20% of the time.

Now, what questions have we left unanswered?

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Dinner

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Dinner

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!

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Breakfast

Advocare Ten Day Cleanse: Breakfast

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.

Advo 3

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

source

  • 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!

A Cleansing Recap

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.

(source)

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?