During the first week of the Engine 2 Diet 28 Day Challenge I lost 5 pounds and that sort of makes me mad.

There were only two major changes to my life in the last week.

    Cutting out dairy
    Being intentional about my food choices

I’ll talk about dairy in a later post because I think the biggest change is intention. That makes me mad because I’d rather have a magic diet to follow. Intention is hard. Intention doesn’t end. It means making the healthy choice over and over. It means making sure to pack my lunch instead of eating out. Intention isn’t sexy or fun.

What does intention look like? Take today for example. For breakfast I had chai oatmeal. That’s oatmeal mixed with a bit of honey, raisins, and garam masala. I had decided to make rice pasta with salsa and beans for lunch. I realized that today was looking pretty light on vegetables and fruit.

I challenge myself to get as many fruit and vegetable servings as I can a day. I started looking at this after a coworker showed me a food journal that she kept for a week. In a week the only vegetable or fruit that crossed her lips was a potato in the form or either fries or chips. I wasn’t the healthiest eating vegetarian at the time but even I was doing better than that.

If I have a day where the main meals are light on veggies I snack on them. I made sure I had an apple on the way to work. I ate baby carrots as a snack. I mixed a 1/4 of a can of pumpkin into the salsa on my pasta. A little bit of pumpkin will disappear into a tomato based sauce really well. It adds nutrition and fiber – it is amazing for bowel health – I recommend it all the time in dogs and cats. I added a few pumpkin seeds too. It is easy to add in great food if you are thinking about it and not just on autopilot.