The Daniel Plan

40 Days to a Healthier Life 

To eat healthier and get my family involved was one of my goals for this year.  The Daniel Plan has helped me to begin to do just that!

Kris and I started the Daniel Plan with Pleasant Valley on February 9th.  The gist of The Daniel Plan is this:



We were in for some drastic changes.  We started out by doing a 10 day detox where we had to eat going by the Daniel Plan plate and could not have any processed food, sugar, dairy, or gluten.  It was HARD!!!!  You do get to slowly add dairy and gluten back in after the 10 days.  The Daniel Plan provides quite a few recipes in the book and I just found more on my own online.  I have to say that most of them were great.  The funny thing is that Kris would agree with this.  Kris agreed to do this with me, but it was definitely my idea.  He was a great sport about the whole thing and rarely complained.  He did miss his candy pretty bad though.  :)

I went into this whole thing thinking that I was going to have the kids doing it all as well.  I told them that we were going to do a little experiment.  I tried to make it sound fun so that they would be okay with it.  I was very curious to know if they had any dairy or gluten issues and thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try to figure it out.  

This was their lunch for that first day.  I tried to get them to eat hummus and failed with Hannah and Lincoln.

I bribed Layton with quarters to take bites of it with his veggies.  He actually did it.

Well, after the first day, I realized I had set myself up for failure.  It was way too hard for them and not worth it at all.  So, they stayed on the same kinds of foods for breakfast and lunches, but ate what we ate for dinner.

Here are some of the things that we ate:

This was called Dr. Hyman's Whole Food Protein Shake and we had it that first morning for breakfast.  It had blueberries, almond butter, pumpkin seeds, chia seeds, walnuts, Brazil nuts, banana, coconut oil, unsweetened almond milk, and water in it and it was disgusting!!!  We could barely stomach it, but we did.  We did not make it again, however.  Nuts in smoothies just don't work for me.  I ended up coming up with my own combination of blueberries, strawberries, banana, spinach, chia seeds, and milk (after the detox) that actually was great.

 We ate TONS of fresh veggies.

I went to Carinos with my mom and aunts one night when they were in town and had a salad with salmon that worked just fine.

I learned to like brown rice (I have always been a while rice girl), turkey bacon, and ground turkey as well.

I definitely had a sweet tooth and craved something sweet.  After the detox, I made these 3 ingredient peanut butter cookies (almond butter, egg, and honey).  They were pretty good, but Kris and some of my friends didn't care for them.

I searched and searched for a good banana bread recipe because we love banana bread.  A friend gave me this one which uses coconut sugar (could have after detox) and oat flour.  I really liked it!

One night we just wanted to go out to eat so we went to Chilies.  We had fajitas but used corn tortillas instead of flour ones.  It was great.

I love one dish meals!

I tried to make an apple crisp but it was a failure.  Not enough taste.

These Soft and Chewy Double Chocolate Cookies were a huge hit with Kris and I both.  They had a dark chocolate bar chopped up in them.

Strawberry Mouse.  Kris didn't care for but I liked it.  It satisfied my sweet tooth.  It was made of full fat unsweetened coconut milk, maple syrup, and strawberries.  Yum!

I tried some overnight oats but wasn't a huge fan.  I will probably try to tweak these and find something that works because they would be an awesome/easy breakfast.

One Pan Mexican Quinoa was pretty good.  The kids weren't big on it, but Kris and I were fine with it.

It was a pretty long 40 days.  But going to the weekly meetings at the church building and talking and sharing recipes with some of my friends that were doing it as well really helped.

I have to say I was SO proud of Kris.  We packed his lunch every day for work and he would get up in the mornings, many times make breakfast, and we would eat together.  Usually Kris was not home for breakfast with us in the mornings, so this was awesome.  He ended up losing 12 pounds and I lost 8 pounds and about 4 inches.  Super happy with our results.  I think I am most proud of the fact that we stuck with it though.  One of the reasons I am even blogging about it is that I want my kids to see that committment is key.  When you say you are going to do something, do it.  I think it is super important in life and will serve you well if you can remember to do what you say you are going to do.  Finish things.  See them through.

We had our end date marked on the calendar.  We got Jeff to watch the kids and went to a movie and to dinner.  We went back to Chilies, but splurged a bit this time.  Then, we went to Cold Stone for ice cream.  It was yummy but it did taste pretty sweet and I ended up only eating half of it and saving the other half for the next day.  They say that your taste buds really change and I think it is true.  The other day I went to Chick-fil-a and ordered a non-sweet tea.  They mistakenly gave me a sweet tea (which I used to love) and I couldn't believe how sweet it tasted.  It was too much, so I swapped it out and got the unsweet kind.  So, I guess it is true about the taste buds.

Food was just part of The Daniel Plan though.  It also involved Faith, Fitness, Focus, and Friends.  We met at the building each week and watched some videos over each part and then broke out into small groups and talked.  We shared recipes which was a huge help.

A couple of other benefits from doing this were that the kids are definitely more conscious about what they are eating.  Many times they will ask if something is healthy or not.  I love this.  Kris is eating a healthier breakfast in the mornings and eating with me/us too.  I feel better about the way I look.  I shrank in some places I wanted to strink.  :-)  I have slept better and have felt more energized.  I really think it helped my moods as well.

Just about the only down side to the whole thing was the cost.  It was extremely expensive.  Eating all those fresh fruits and veggies and buying the "weird" ingredients like maple syrup, coconut sugar, coconut oil, coconut flour, almond flour, oat flour, etc really added up.  It was a big, big challenge to try to fit this into our budget and I was not able to do it.  Therefore, we will be tweaking things a bit now.  However, I do plan to stick with most things like using coconut oil and olive oil, using ground turkey, brown rice, whole wheat flour and other flours, cutting way back on sweets, and not going back to cokes.

I am super glad we did this little experiment.  I think it was life changing.