Clean Eating: Final Thoughts

If you're just now coming in on this post, head back to the beginning and start from there!

As most of you know, my family participated in the Buzzfeed 7 Day Clean Eating Challenge the past week. It was interesting (or something like that) week for our family, bu we finally finished the challenge!

Here are my final thoughts on this challenge:

1. This isn't the best clean eating challenge for families. The challenge is written as per one person, but we took it and multipled it by 4 for our family. A lot of the recipes have TONS of prep work, that would be okay for one person, but not so much for 4 people.

2. With that being said, many of the comments I saw on the challenge noted how expensive it was to buy all the food. Even multiplying the ingredients by 4, we managed to find all the groceries at Aldi's and HyVee for around $250 for the week. THE WEEK. If you average this out by person to 4 meals a day for 7 days (which if you know my dad, that was the first thing we did), it only cost $63 per person for the entire week.

If you don't buy name brand items, try to shop budget friendly and buy in bulk, this challenge is not as epensive as it seems. Eating healthy doesn't mean eating expensive.

3. Some of these recipes weren't really that great, plain and simple. It's definitely hard to come up with a wide variety of healthy options for multiple meals a day, I get that. Some of the meals included in this challenge were nothing even close to something my family would eat (ie. tempeh soup or parsnip noodles).

Our favorite recipes, however were:

Cauliflower rice bowl with goat cheese, tomatos, salsa and hard boiled eggs

Tart cheery overnight oats

Carrot cake oatmeal

Barley/chicken dish

Salmon dish

4. While we may not continue to eat like this for the rest of Lent, our family is noticing that this challenge has helped with our portion control! Ben still eats like he's feeding a family of 12 himself, but my parents and I have noticed that we can eat less and still feel full.

And last but certainly not least....

5. Going a week without alcohol sucks.

Thanks for following us through this 7 day journey everyone!

Keep checking back periodically to see how our family is doing throughout Lent!