20 Days into the 30 Day Challenge

We are now officially 20 days into our first 30 Day Challenge. Fast food franchises across Utah have felt the pinch of losing such valuable customers that they have resorted to sending hundreds of fliers to our mailbox to try to lure us back. Okay, maybe not. We're one little family that ate out occasionally, and we would get the fliers in our mailbox even if we owned a fast food chain for ourselves. But the fact is, we're 2/3 through with our first challenge and its a certifiable fact that we probably haven't gone this long without fast food since we were both living under our parent's roofs. Not that it's been easy every single day. But we'll take the mini victory and share our progress so far.

Visions of sugar plums...well, maybe not
I think the most difficult part of the first 20 days was just the fact that once you have had your addiction (I believe it is) taken from you, all you do is have a slow calvacade of pictures running through your head - all the things you no longer get to have. A few of the family's favorites (which is guaranteed to make those fast food lovers salivate and the chosen few who don't eat the stuff cringe):

• Neopolitan shake (In-N-Out) - pure evil in a cup. Strawberry, vanilla, and chocolate ice cream split in a cup. And in pure In-N-Out style, it's not on the menu. It calls to you like the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
• McDonald's Fries (McDonald's) - don't deny it. You wish that the world was like Willy Wonka's factory - except that everything was made from McDonald's french fries. That rare combination of having more grease than your arteries can handle, but being so smooth that you try to rationalize that potatoes are, in the end, a natural food from the good Earth.
• Fazoli's breadsticks (Fazoli's) - The classic food that takes you through three stages. First, the initial breadstick tastes like the Gods of Olympus were bored and said "if we were to make a breadstick, what would it taste like?". Second stage - "this breadstick is quite rich. Is there really bread in this, or is it a stick of butter with a splash of garlic? I better have one more." And the third stage - "I sure am glad I got an extra dozen with my meal. How does one person survive with the 2 measly breadsticks they give you with your meal?!?! That's not even enough to make it home!"
• Fry Sauce (Arctic Circle) - The beauty of this stuff is that it goes on anything. Sure, its good on fries. Burgers? Dip away. Chicken fingers would work. The basics, right? You know the stuff is bad for you when you start wondering what a turkey sandwich would taste like with the stuff dripping from the bread. Or a chicken drumstick. Or enchiladas. Coffee cake. Blueberry pies. Okay, maybe not to that extreme but open a packet of the fry sauce and watch where your mind takes you.
• Pizza (Dominos, Pizza Hut, Little Caesars, etc.) - this is the dangerous stuff. The food that makes even the tiniest eater find ways to expand their stomachs. We've all experienced it - you sit down for a slice, and when you look up to realize you haven't used a napkin for the last 45 minutes, all you see is a cardboard box with a perfect grease stain that represents the original size of the pie, with beautiful grease lines indicating where they cut it into 8 delicious pieces.

See what I mean? Try telling yourself that you can't have a whiff of things like that. I know, I know. Your first thought is that it's only 20 days. It's not that hard. But when you step back and realize how often we all east fast food, that 20 days starts to feel like a really long time. It's nearly three weeks of NOT ordering a pizza because you don't want to cook. Of NOT stopping at McDonald's for a quick lunch. Of NOT dipping your burger, fries, and macaroni salad into fry sauce. Of NOT having a meal that we are made to think is "happy".

The Point of the challenge
But this post isn't about how hard it is. It's about how changing it is. A few fast and fun facts about what we've learned in the first 20 days.

1. When you eat at home, you go through A LOT of food. As you know, our family consists of myself, Elisa (4'11", remember?), Lukas (4 years old), and Miles (the only fast food for him is if Mom and Dad are in a hurry changing his diaper at his first feeding of the day). In the past 20 days, we have averaged drinking 2 gallons of milk a week, 1 1/2-2 loaves of bread, 2 packs of lunch meat, enough chicken to make a local KFC proud, a package of Oreos (hey, no fast food and you find new ways to punish your body), 1/2 of our curiously large backstock of spaghetti (it appears if we were hit with an earthquake, we could have lived off of spaghetti for 2 and a half years), and more.
2. Related to #1, we still haven't cleared $100 in a week at the grocery store. Take that, fast food chains!
3. Your food cooking creativity certainly is heightened. First week, I fully admit that my food choices were lazy at best. I think the realization hit me when I had forgotten to defrost something for the second day in a row, and Elisa's reaction to another round of "eggs?" was more along the lines of "if you feed me eggs one more night, I will actually attempt to reverse the egg laying process, using you as the chicken in my scientific test."
4. You experience tantrums. If you think you're addicted to the fast food experience, it's nothing compared to your kids. Lukas found everything you could want in a fast food joint - greasy food, toys with your meal, wild children showing initial signs of a "Lord of the Flies" stage adaptation, playlands that simply scream "your child is going to take more than a happy meal with him".
5. Most of all, though, you feel better. You feel healthier. You feel happier. It's weird. You don't expect to. You think it will be depressing. But, in fact, its a happier place. A fresher experience. And even the worst foods at home just don't feel as heavy or bad for you as what you ate "out there".

So 20 days in, we're making great progress. And I feel us already gearing up for our second 30-day challenge. We haven't decided what exactly it will be, and its probably good that we have 10 more days to figure it out. I did suggest to Elisa that we give up sweets, and I think I saw a flash of evil behind those beautiful brown eyes. Literally, she was smiling but her eyes said "I can hurt you in ways that you haven't even thought of." Any ideas from the crowd?

What should our next 30-day challenge be?