"Sometimes throwing in that extra little twist can take you farther than you thought!"
We have a variety of participants in each challenge... We refer to those who have been with us from the start as "The Veterans", then each challenge we have many new participants. All of you are coming from different backgrounds and experience levels when it comes to the things we are asking you to do. There has been much discussion throughout each challenge about the gray areas and fairness. Some of you personally choose to be much stricter than others and feel it's unfair at the end when we start divvying out rewards. One extremely gray area that we attempting to "un-gray" this time is white flour.
So our Holiday Edition Twist is this - During weeks 1-4, white flour will not be against the rules. However, during weeks 5-8, white flour will be completely off limits.
If you're not familiar with how to remove white flour from your diet, don't let this scare you off!! It's really quite simple. In your home cooking, replace that bag of white flour with whole wheat. And when it comes to purchasing things that are already prepared, we will teach you how to read labels and what questions to ask to be sure that you are following the rules. We have created a page titled "Clarity - White Flour" and over the course of the first 4 weeks of the challenge we will get as much information there as we can so your transition is simple.
Along with removing white flour, refined and white pastas and rice will be unacceptable during weeks 4-8. Replace them with whole grain pasta and brown rice. This will be an easy switch because all you have to do is pick up a different bag from the grocery store!
In the end, you'll discover how much better you feel when you leave all that refined, unnatural white stuff where it belongs - on the shelf!
Maybe you already covered this in the last challenge (sorry I was missing!), but another fun tid-bit to know is that spring white wheat makes a lighter flour than hard red wheat. So if you're baking primarily with wheat, look for the bag of White Wheat (Bob's Red Mill sells it, so does Trader Joe's and it's much cheaper). Or you can just buy the spring white wheat and grind it up. I use both, but need more yeast for the red wheat to rise (or baking powder for pancakes). I can share my whole wheat recipes if anyone needs some tried and true ones.
ReplyDeleteI love this idea! My problem is going to fast in trying to better myself and then falling flat on my face. In the last challenge I stopped drinking diet soda and haven't looked back. Looking forward to removing the "white" now! Thank you for starting off slow and teaching us how to do it. In fact, I'd love to see a challenge like that... take all the crap we eat and every week replace one item with something healthy so that it becomes a life style... pop to water, white flour to wheat, sugars, high fructose corn syrup, etc!
ReplyDeleteLine Upon Line, huh, Amy? That does work better in life. Good for you and your soda. Luckily, soda has never been an issue with me. But I have many others :)
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