Attempting Dairy Free

I read this article on Well & Good about a woman who cut dairy from her diet for a week and what happened. I don’t have acne, so I was mainly interested in the fact that she felt less bloated and crampy. I don’t feel crampy often, but I certainly feel bloated often. 

I thought about it: What would have to change about my diet to go dairy free for a week?

The two things that I think would effect me the most would be my inability to eat greek yogurt and not having whipped cream on my coffee. I’m a weirdo and I really love putting whipped cream on my coffee instead of mixing milk into it. I really, really enjoy it. And Greek yogurt with frozen cherries is my go-to meal when I don’t feel like cooking. 

Other than that I’d have to make sure my salad dressings don’t have dairy in it and I already drink coconut milk at home, so that’s no issue at all. 

As part of my attempt to really reign in my eating and drinking in 2017, this would be a good exercise. To really hone in on how much dairy I’m consuming (every time I have to not have something because there’s dairy in it would be eye opening, for sure) and also to see how differently I would feel. 

I’m not going vegan, ever, because I like chicken, and sometimes bacon. But let’s see if dairy is the root of some of my stomach issues, shall we? I’ll do it from the 2nd through the 9th of January. Game on. 

Advertisement

Food Cleanse, Post-Holiday

While abroad, I subsisted mostly from carbs (mini croissants, muffins, cinnamon rolls), meat, and the occasional carrot and potato. And coffee. So much coffee. They eat a lot of meat over there. They have the occasional vegetarian option (no, I’m not a vegetarian) but mostly all meals include meat. They have a ton of Mexican and Italian restaurants over there too (what) but I did not go to Scandinavia to eat Chiptole. 

So, I ate all of the meat. I ate deer, elk, and reindeer. I handed over the contents of my bank account on my first night in Helsinki for some seriously delicious reindeer. I kid, it wasn’t my whole bank account but it was probably the most expensive meal I’d had over there and it was worth every cent. 

They offered salads at certain places, but it’s rather cold in those countries so I’m pretty sure anything they were serving was being shipped from thousands of miles away so I ate regionally, as much as my body may have hated it. Aside from the occasional yogurt and granola at breakfast, I ate almost entirely differently from how I eat on the regular. I went 12 days without eating peanut butter (seriously, a guy from Hawaii who was working in a shop in the Stockholm Arlanda airport said that peanut butter is very American). 

Anyways, yesterday I started a week-long, self-imposed cleanse. Not a liquid cleanse because those are bullshit, but one with whole foods. I had a beet-carrot-apple juice for breakfast yesterday (okay, with coffee) and a kale salad with a little bit of grilled chicken for lunch (I was so excited for this). I broke down during the afternoon when I was very, very tired and ate the almond croissant that my dude had brought to the airport the night before incase I was hungry after 10 hours of traveling. Then I just had a piece of Ezekiel bread with almond butter on it for dinner. I wasn’t all that hungry anyway.

Hopefully I will have re-adjusted to my normal routine by the end of the week.