nutritarian challenge

january 10th marked the day of a new lifestyle. we are doing the nutritarian 6-week challenge. we are following the 'eat to live' plan. it's vegan but goes beyond that. no animal products, no sugar, no salt, no processed foods and no dairy. basically we eat a plant based diet. i've been researching for almost a year. my friend robin was the first person i knew that was living this way. i started following her blog and just got sucked in. it's taken me a year to feel like i could finally do it. go there and devour every post. you will be so amazed at how much her life has changed in just a year! robin-leantowardthesun. check out their before and after photos! amazing.
i particularly love this post and this post. and this post is my favorite! read them...i dare you.

i always thought being a vegan or making such drastic changes or eliminating a food group from your diet was unhealthy. but HELLO?! i'm over weight and unhealthy. i don't really have a leg to stand on with that debate. and as i've researched this for almost a year now, and met various people, i started to realize that the vegans i know are the most healthy people i know. so it's about time i give it a shot and make my own discovery and decision so i do have a leg to stand on. i have lost 40 pounds in the last year, yet i'm more unhealthy than i was before i lost the weight. that was shocking to me. you can be 'skinny' and still be unhealthy. my b-12 is low, my cholesterol is high, which is wasn't before, my sugars are now higher than they were before, my mood swings are the same, my pms is worse. so the research that i have done on 'eating clean', 'vegan', and 'nutritarian' eating all had the same things to say about health and illness, especially when it comes to autoimmune diseases. i have very high hopes that we will be feeling better very soon.
our hopes with this trial are as follows:
-kg will lose that last 15-20 stubborn pounds he's been trying to lose and become more healthy
-i will lose the last 40 pounds i need to lose and become more healthy, dropping my sugars, lowering my cholesterol, getting my sex drive back, eliminating pms and mood swings, having more energy and less fatigue, 'curing' my autoimmune diseases, being pain free among so many others!
-get rid of flower's eczema and generally be more healthy
-eliminating river's addiction to candy/sugar(totally our fault and i feel terrible for it!) and the eczema she has recently developed.

so if you are part of our lives i'm begging you to please support us in this. please don't offer the girls things they can't eat or this won't work and then we'll never know if it could have made a difference in their lives. we'd love for you to offer them fresh fruits and veggies! :) the really strict stuff is just for 6-weeks and then we can add a few things back in depending on what we discover for ourselves. i suspect school will be hard for flower because she eats breakfast there but we are going to send it with her and talk with her teacher. church is going to be difficult but i talked with river's nursery leader and she is totally on board with us providing her snack. we also plan to have fresh fruit in the bag to lure the girls away from the bishops candy jar after church. thankfully both the girls love most fruits and veggies. at my brother's house for alyse and torta's birthday's river actually chose a banana over cake. :) (that was the night before we started this endeavor)
but i think if people really love us, they'll help us with this. it's not going to be easy so we really need the support! just know this decision wasn't made lightly. i've been stressing about it for almost a year! so thank you in advance.