7 Fantastic Healthy Meals that Will Make You Forget You are on a Diet

Going on a detox diet does not mean boring salads and going hungry!

I stared blankly at the number blinking on our weighing scale.

Yikes! I do not weigh that much!

I was in denial that I had been slowly gaining weight and that was why I had been feeling sluggish and tired a lot.

So I decided it was about time that I lost weight.

My friend suggested I try the detox diet recommended by her nutritionist. She gave me the list of allowed foods and these very basic rules:

• Breakfast – 100 grams yogurt and fruit OR 2 eggs, OR 2 egg whites and fruit
• Lunch & Dinner – 130 grams of allowed meat (i.e. chicken, turkey, and fish) plus vegetables to fill up your plate and 30 grams of allowed carbohydrates
• Snack – only in the afternoon – one serving of nuts or fruit
• Buy organic as much as possible.
• And only 1 tablespoon of fat per day.

Since of course, that didn’t give me much to go on, I went back to what I learned from when I did a Whole 30 a while back and adapted my menu from there.

So I started on my 15-day detox diet, and guess what? I lost 4 kilos! Just by dieting.

And I felt lighter and energized.

Since this detox diet will not be applicable to each and every one (this was formulated especially for my friend), I am not sharing the actual diet plan.

But I am sharing my 7 favorite meals from my 15 days of clean and healthy eating.

If you do want to try a detox diet, here are my tips for success:

1. Meal plan. This will ensure that you know what to eat for the next few days, and will also help you prepare some of the food ahead of time so you can have left-overs for lunch, even dinner.
2. Think positive. You WILL get through this. You are the master of your body and mind.
3. Drink lots of water. You will feel hungry. If it’s not yet time to eat, drink a glass of water. Sometimes, you will just mistake thirst for hunger. If you are really hungry and feeling weak, then have a small snack.
4. Be prepared to eat a LOT of vegetables, in salad-form, roasted or steamed.
5. Drink lemon water in the morning to jump-start your body. Since I started drinking lemon water (1 lemon freshly squeezed diluted in a glass of water), I found that I don’t need coffee first thing in the morning and I am more energized. See here for more benefits.

Without further ado, here are my top 7 detox diet meals

1. Baked eggs

I am not an eggs-for-breakfast person. I didn’t even eat fried eggs until recently. Yeah, weird, right? And I still don’t like scrambled eggs and omelets.

But baked eggs, I enjoy.

I haven’t made them in ages, and when I was meal planning for 15 days, of which the allowed breakfast items are yogurt, eggs, and fruit, I had to be creative. I couldn’t eat hardboiled eggs every other day!

So, I had baked eggs to break the monotony.

See here for the recipe. Which you don’t have to follow to the letter as baked eggs are so customizable.

2. Salad with fish

Most of my lunches over the 15 days were some sort of salad with fish. It was really very simple. I would just mix and match the following:

• Choice of fish: canned mackerel or canned sardines, friend in their oil or fried fresh sardines
• Salad greens: young spinach, arugula and/or lamb’s lettuce
• Additions (I usually choose 2) – tomatoes, thinly sliced zucchini, half an avocado, half an apple, cashews or almonds
• Salad dressing: balsamic vinaigrette – 1 tablespoon

  

I would get enough salad greens to fill my plate, top with my choice of additions, then the fried fish. Drizzle over the vinaigrette, and I was good to go.

This was my first time to try mackerel from a can, and when it was fried to a crisp, it was surprisingly good with salad.

3. Roasted cauliflower

I made this 4 times in 15 days. It made a good substitute for rice.

I wrote a whole post about it as it was super good!

See here for the link.

4. Poached salmon

I followed this method but used smaller salmon fillets, 125-gram ones. I also omitted the wine, as it is not allowed and added a splash of balsamic vinegar instead.

It is easy enough to make for one person or scaled up for company. I made this for friends and they enjoyed it.

It is so good! The salmon is perfectly cooked and actually seasoned. It is also very quick to make, so it is perfect for a weeknight dinner or to serve friends.

5. Blackened Tilapia with avocado cucumber salsa

This has got to be my favorite healthy meal discovery. I found the recipe via Pinterest, and I loved it! See here for the recipe.

6. Poached Cod with Tomato & Saffron

This is Bon Appetit’s recipe, which I followed, except I substituted water for the wine, as that was not allowed on the diet. It was good. My daughter Becca loved the sauce and was slurping it like it was soup.

7. Greek Chicken

One word.

Tzatziki.

That is what made this dish.

I followed this recipe, but I made only the chicken and tzatziki.

I then served the chicken and tzatziki with roasted vegetables.

So good!

There you have it, folks! Eating healthy need not be hard.

If you want to save this for future reference, here is a pinnable image.