Hey guys, hope you're doing well today, and so what we're talking about today is an experiment that my wife and I did over the first three weeks of January. So we partook in the Daniel Fast, and so the Daniel Fast is like a vegan but to the extreme. So vegan is an obvious, a plant-based diet where the people consume nothing but items that come from plants. Zero items from animals, it's not just meats. That's also byproducts of meat, IE, butter, any kind of dairy. Even honey, even they go to honey to the extremes.
So what the Daniel Fast is, Daniel Fast is those things, the vegan diet, but it's also no processed sugar, the sugar substitutes, no caffeine, no gluten. So it's a little bit more difficult than just being vegan because even if you're vegan you can still have some sweets and different things like that. So the Daniel Fast is a, it comes from the Bible. It comes from the Book of Daniel and there's a lot more research you can do on that if you'd like to, but the reason we did it was because even as healthy as we do eat, as good as we do eat sometimes, there are things that we just felt like we need to reset in our bodies.
Am I saying that this is a philosophy that you could stick to all the time? Yeah, you could and it's not that hard, it's just, it takes an extreme amount of planning. So we did the Daniel Fast for three weeks, started tapering down off of caffeine because I love coffee. A friend of mine, Jill, said, "I love nothing more than getting up in the morning, reading and studying and just having a black cup of coffee. I absolutely love it," and so we cut that out. It took me about a week to cut that out and I had a headache for two days.
Now I'm not really sure if it's from the sugar or if it's from the caffeine, but anyway I had a pretty crushing headache. It was just really miserable for a little bit. But then what we did is we after about two days my mind opened up. So it was a very, very clear thought process on this diet. So I had an original weight when I started off about 213. I'm a 205 to 215 guy from the time I really graduated high school, even when I was playing college football and even when we were competing in the Cross Fit Games I was at a 205 to 215 weight, but in this, I did not change any of my workouts and my workout regimen.
I workout every day. Do something at some point every day, and so I workout every day. My weight from 213 all the way down to 200 pounds. So I lost 13 pounds in about three weeks. I don't know, I looked a lot better and I felt a lot better. One of the other things that I felt like was a lot better on this thought process of eating was I felt like I slept better. I think the combination of no caffeine and the combination of no sugar was a huge proponent of us sleeping better at night.
Another thing is not only do I go to sleep better, and I usually sleep really, really well, but I also got up quicker. I got up with more energy. I got up with a clearer thought process. I was not groggy because I wasn't dealing with a high or a low in the caffeine. So I think that helped a lot. So one of the things also that we did was we found out we had to plan better. And we're planners, but we also found out we had to plan better. Had to read more labels, had to look at things because a lot of preservatives that the Daniel Fast doesn't allow you to have.
We didn't want to be legalistic, but we also wanted to do it the right way. There's a fine line between being super legalistic about something and then also making sure you're doing it the right way. One of the things we found out that was a great snack was cashews, so we love cashews but we found a brand I think it was from Aldi that had just cashews and sea salt and was great. We also found a brand of sweet potatoes that we found, excuse me, sweet potato chips that we found that was really, really good.
So overall it was good. It was very difficult sometimes because you couldn't just go run and get something and if you found out you didn't plan really well it was hard to ... The thing that I think I'm going to keep throughout these even after we're done with it is we did smoothies. I ate smoothies, probably two smoothies a day. What I did is I chocked them full of spinach. So every morning I had a green smoothie so they weren't visually appetizing but they had a great taste.
So all we did was tons and tons of spinach. We did frozen fruit and then any kind of fruit juice or if you wanted to go really extreme you cut back on the fruit juice. You could go with water, but they were really, really good. That gave me tons of just, I felt like I was eating more greens on this than I was on anything else. The thing I did feel like we were buying a lot of, we were buying a ton of fruits, a ton of vegetables.
One of the grab things that I had, I love having things that I can just grab and have a snack if I'm headed out the door taking a kid to practice or headed out the door to do something I can grab something, put it in my mouth and it be something good for me to have for just a snack and that was apples. I had a ton of apples, which an apple a day keeps the doctor away. Apples are great just good whole food that you can use to have as a snack.
The other thing I felt like it did, it's helped us get creative. We had to look up some recipes even though I'm the recipe guy, we had to look up so more sustainable and easier recipes for us and it helped us get creative a little bit. The last thing is I think it was a little bit expensive. When you start buying things that are real food or products that are real food it does get a little bit expensive, but overall man, the Daniel Fast was absolutely wonderful. Do I recommend it? Absolutely. I think it's really something good to kind of clean out your system and get reset because even us, it's our job to eat healthily. It's my job to have a healthy and fit lifestyle and we do.
We do have ice cream. I freaking love ice cream. We stay on track with a lot of things but there are some things we do that are not great for us just because that's who we are as humans. So this was really, really good for us as a family, but also from a physical standpoint, from a mental standpoint and also, there's a spiritual component too that we really, really enjoyed as well. So hey, if you've got any questions, man, I would love to hear your questions about the Daniel Fast.
I'd love to hear also your suggestions about the Daniel fast and abetter way to do it or the way that you did it. Love to dialogue and love to see how people are doing things, so please, if you have any questions, email us info@mealfit.co I really, really appreciate you guys watching. Have any comments or anything, please let us know.
Look forward to serving you guys. Thanks
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