Drinking 40FRESH
It’s the start of your second week and today you’re starting things off by eliminating ultra-processed drinks from your diet. Hopefully you’ve lined up some suitable replacement drinks for yourself. Personally, I drink a lot of Spindrift and smoothies that I make in my Vitamix. If you love smoothies, give this recipe a whirl.
For morning coffee, I love to drink cold brew coffee. It’s less bitter than normal coffee and it has more caffeine. Dutch Bros and Starbucks both have decent nitro cold brews. The nitro gives it an even creamier flavor. For the homemade stuff, I use an Asobu Coldbrew maker.
Here’s what my typical drinks schedule looks like:
Morning
Nitro cold brew (or homemade cold brew)
Afternoon
Smoothies, Spindrift, sparkling water
Evening
Spindrift, sparkling water, water
Whatever drinks you decide on, don’t forget to use the habit stacking techniques you learned about on day 6. Remember your cues and reward yourself for making changes. At a minimum, after you drink something healthy, recite your health mantra back to yourself. You are making better choices now and every time you do, it’s a vote in favor of the new identity you’re forming.
Today’s Checklist
If you’re following along with the 40FRESH Challenge, here’s your homework for today:
Read this post
Start your drinks habit
Learn the 40FRESH Rules for food
Don’t forget to journal
The 40FRESH Rules for Food
On day 10, we’re going to say goodbye to ultra-processed snack foods, so it’s time to start learning about the rules for food. Go ahead and print out a copy of the 40FRESH Rules. This guide should be pretty clear, but we’re going to go through each category just to make sure there is no ambiguity.
Always
This category is pretty easy. There are no ingredients lists for this category because everything is grown by nature or comes directly from an animal. Oh, and BONUS: you can eat pasta made from durum wheat semolina.
A few other things made from animal products that are included in this category:
- Plain yogurt made from only milk (cultures okay)
- Sour cream made from only cultured cream
- Heavy cream
@Home
The main thing to remember with this category is that these ingredients are only approved for your own use in home cooking. When you cook at home, you can control the number of servings of these items. As the rules state, don’t go crazy dumping fats and sugar into everything you make, but feel free to use these judiciously at home.
Limited - Follow the Taco Rule
Although the rules for drinks are pretty clear, the five to one ratio for food items is a bit harder to follow. To make it easier to understand, let’s put it into context a dinner item I make regularly: tacos. When I last made tacos, here’s what I used:
Always
- Ground beef
- Spices (chili powder, oregano, cumin, cayenne)
- Garlic
- Onion
- Lettuce
- Tomato
- Avocado
- Sour cream
@Home
- Salt
Limited
If we look at the proportions of everything in this meal, it’s pretty clear that the bulk of the ingredients in this meal by both count and proportion are Always ingredients. I call this the Taco Rule. For all of your meals, this is the sort of balance that you’re trying to achieve. All the better if you can use even fewer Limited ingredients.
Nope
It’s typically pretty easy to identify these foods by their long lists of ingredients and additives that don’t sound like anything you’d find growing outside. That said, sometimes you’ll come across a food where you’re a little unsure. That’s where it helps to have the Open Food Facts app.
Take the Aardvark hot sauce from above as an example. It has more than 5 ingredients, but they’re all from the Always and @Home group. Sure enough, if you look it up, it will show you it is a processed (not ultra-processed) food, which puts it in the Limited category. For a long list of ingredients that automatically put foods in the Nope category, see this listing provided by Open Food Facts (bottom of the page).
Up Next...
Another one in the books! Go ahead and mark off another X in your calendar. Keep up the work with your food journal and mantra. We’re really going to start leveraging them over the next few days. Tomorrow is the last day of the planning phase and we’re going to be reviewing our snacking habits.