The Abundance Diet, Day 2!

In case you missed yesterday's post, I'm doing Somer McCowan's 28-day meal plan from her book The Abundance Diet for my annual January cleanse. And by "cleanse," I just mean I'm eating whole foods for the month, and I'm cutting out gluten, white sugar, and processed food. That's basically Somer's plan in a nutshell, and it goes right along with my style of a clean eating "detox."

I'm also doing Yoga With Adriene's new 30-day Yoga Camp throughout the month (and likely through February). If you don't know about Yoga with Adriene, you must check it out! Adriene is this cool vegetarian chick from Texas who makes the best free yoga videos, and she just launched a 30-day yoga camp. Since I run three days a week, I'm not doing the yoga camp daily. I just don't have time to run for an hour and do yoga for an hour before work. But I'm doing yoga on non-running days like today. So before I launched into Day One of Yoga Camp, I drank this quick and easy Chia Limemade from The Abundance Diet.

The picture is a little shadowy because it was 6 a.m. and still dark outside, so I was working with my kitchen light only. But this drink of fresh lime juice, water, stevia, and chia seeds was really refreshing after waking up all parched. I made it the night before, so the chia seeds gelled up nicely. This wasn't on the 28-day meal plan but rather from The Abundance Diet's optional juice fast chapter. I'm not doing a juice fast this time, but I will work some juices in as pre-yoga snacks throughout the month.

After yoga, it was time for my green smoothie. There's a green smoothie every weekday on the Abundance Diet. Today's Razzleberry Lemonade Green Smoothie doesn't look all that green, but it's loaded with two cups of kale. Also, there's mixed frozen berries, banana, and lemon. 

Every day for lunch, you get a soup and a salad. But the portions are quite large (but still remarkably low-cal), so I'm splitting this up each day into Lunch #1 and Lunch #2. I'm basically a hobbit. 

Lunch #1 was this Greek Chickpea Chopped Salad with tofu feta, balsamic vinaigrette, kalamata olives, tomatoes, cucumbers, and red onion. The flavor was amazing. LOVE anything with tofu feta! I had this around 10:30 a.m. because why not? I get two lunches!

That was a very hearty salad, and it definitely would have sufficed as a stand-alone lunch. But I wasn't too stuffed for my 1 p.m. second lunch of Creamy White Bean, Kale, & Potato Stew with Mushroom Sausage. This creamy stew is made with mushrooms that are seasoned with sausage spices, like fennel and red pepper flakes. And there's potato, kale, and white beans. It's all thickened with a cashew cream. I could eat this all week honestly. So creamy and delicious. I'm halving all the recipes so I'll have this one more time, but I wish I had made extra to freeze for later.

My snack was Oil-Free Olive Hummus with steamed veggies. I'm usually a big fan of oil, but Somer's plan is low-oil. And this hummus is really just fine without the oil. The olives are listed as one of the variations of the recipe in the book, and they were a little oily since I used kalamata. So it definitely wasn't a totally fat-free hummus, but it's lighter than what I'm used to. 

Dinner was another hearty meal. Here's the Mexican Homestyle Casserole with black beans, brown rice, corn, bell pepper, tomatoes, and a homemade cashew cheddar sauce. It's topped with Somer's cashew sour cream. Definitely hit the spot on this cold evening. The cashew cheese flavor is phenomenal, and it gets all thick and creamy in the oven.

That's it for day two! I just spent three hours in the kitchen prepping all the meals for tomorrow, and I cannot wait to eat them! There's a LOT of prep a few days a week on this diet, but after tomorrow, the meals will start to repeat for a few days to make use of leftovers. So I'll get a break from the kitchen.