Welcome to Day 3 of the 5 Day Carb Challenge

Hey there!   Welcome to Day 3. You are officially over halfway through the 5 Day Challenge to End Carb Cravings, which is so exciting!

So today's challenge is all about making your life easier and not more challenging, which should make it a pretty easy challenge to complete, right?   

There are a couple different reasons for that. So first of all, I should say that the challenge today is to have leftovers for lunch and to pre-pack them the night before.  This way, they're ready to go in the morning, and so you have a no-brainer lunch. 

There are a few reasons for this challenge today…

Make Things Easy for Yourself To Set Yourself Up For Success

Number one, change is hard. We as human beings naturally gravitate toward “same”. Our bodies are trained to gravitate towards a level of homeostasis which means constantly changing to achieve sameness.  Kind of cool, right?

So it makes sense that each time you try to change, you're going to meet resistance both psychologically and physically.

Right now, you're trying to change the way you look at food, and you're trying to get rid of carb cravings so that you don't feel those crazy energy crashes and that need for unhealthy food that you know is doing you no good.

One of the key things we can do when we're trying to create change is to make it as easy as possible for ourselves, right? Because if it's hard we're very unlikely to continue to do it.  

Mornings can be chaotic. Maybe you stayed up a bit too late the night before, and you hit the snooze button a few times, or you’re stressing about something, whatever the situation may be.

Whatever the reason, packing lunches gets pushed to the wayside because you're rushing out the door.  If you have to go to work, you don't have a good solid lunch to eat.

Then, one of two things happens: you either just graze on random food around the office, or you resort to fast food (full of unhealthy ingredients), and then you're probably going to experience carb cravings all afternoon.  

You know now how important fat and protein are, so it's very important that at lunchtime you have a balance of good quality complex carbohydrates, good fat, and good protein.  One  way you can guarantee that, especially when you're working on balanced dinners already, is to just double your dinner efforts and pack leftovers the next day for lunch.  

If you don't like leftovers (because a lot of people have a thing with leftovers), you can have the same basic components but put them together differently. So what you can do for lunch is:

• put greens in the bottom of a container;
• add some of the protein you had for dinner the night before;
• place whatever veggies that are leftover from dinner;
• then maybe add avocado for some extra fat or maybe a little olive oil and vinegar if that's going to make sense for dressing, otherwise a sauce you had for supper. 

It's basically leftovers into a really delicious greens bowl that tastes like a whole different meal but still uses the same components, so it's easy. 

You also want to make sure you're putting it together the night before so it's ready to go and all you have to do is grab it out of the fridge, take it with you and eat it. 

This simple habit is going to do a whole lot for your carb cravings later in the afternoon and early evening. 

And so today, we want to have that great lunch that's going to take you all the way through the afternoon.  If you are following the challenge manual, you should have already packed it last night. If you forgot, start for tomorrow. No big deal! Pack it up tonight and don't forget to post all about it in the group.  Let me know how you're feeling. Let me know where your cravings are at.  Let me know if they're better. 

So, that's it for me for today. But I will see you in the group, and I will see you here tomorrow!

~Coach Suzanne