That’s right, I’m embarking on a “challenge.”

I’m often skeptical of challenges like these – after all, what really changes when it’s over? What keeps us from going back to exactly the way we were before? My friend Jesse, over at The Ripening, has been doing a series of 21-day challenges including going car-free, meditating, drinking only water, etc. This was very inspiring to me, especially when he described how the challenges DID stay with him. He rode his bike more often than before, would meditate frequently even if not daily, etc.

For me, eating right and being conscious about my food is important. I also want to feel good and I know I feel best when I’m consuming lots of vegetables and fruits every day. However, when life gets hectic, I often find myself sliding back into familiar habits such as sandwiches, pastas and pizza. Before I know it, an entire day or two has passed without any fresh, raw vegetables. Not good!

The bf and I decided that going gluten-free for 3 weeks could help us break those habits so we’ll be doing this from September 24 to October 14. We’re not going to give up gluten for forever, but we’re hoping that by focusing on eating other things for 3 weeks we can get accustomed to NOT eating foods with gluten even when we’re crazy busy. We want to learn, together, how to be more conscious and also get a jump-start on establishing go-to recipes that are full of quality meats/proteins and vegetables.

I’m going to track our progress: what we eat, where we’ve found successes and wins, what’s hard, and any failings we have along the way. Here are some initial pain points we’ve identified and how we’re going to deal with them:

Beer: The bf LOVES beer and I like it a whole lot, too. We’re going to challenge ourselves to find some good gluten-free beers. It won’t be easy, but we’re up for it. Also, when we want to have a drink we can definitely turn to wine.

Pizza: We love pizza. And not the low-quality, commodity stuff from the chains. We love the gourmet pies made by chefs with local, fresh ingredients. The downside is that they also use regular dough. We do know of one local pizza joint that offers gluten-free crusts in addition to fresh ingredients (Uncle Maddio’s), so if we get a craving we can stay on track!

Pasta: We don’t eat a lot of pasta, but we do love it. However, we also love rice so I think we can easily make more meals with it.

Bread: Ah, bread – especially fresh sourdough from the local farmer’s market. For now, it’ll be Ezekiel’s bread. Not the same, but it’ll suffice. Our longer-term plan with bread is to make it with our own starters and give lots of time for fermentation to make digesting the gluten easier on our systems.

Another note: We know that gluten sneaks into MANY foods but we’re less concerned about that for the purpose of this experiment. Neither of us are celiac and our main aim is to eat more real foods, which we think can be achieved in the way we’ve outlined.

If you want to see more about how we’ve been doing so far, check out the other posts:

Gluten-free: Days 1-4
Gluten-free: Days 5-11
Gluten-Free: Days 12-18