I have been wanting to do a cleanse for a while now, but since I am not a proponent of doing straight juice cleanses, I wasn't sure what to do. That is until I came across
Urban Remedy. Urban Remedy offers a variety of organic, raw, vegan healthy meal plans that are delivered right to your door.
Gilt.com recently had an offer to receive
Cindy Crawford's Essentials three-day meal plan, so I bought one.
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| Source: Urban Remedy |
My nicely packed box of goodies arrived via overnight mail.
The plan comes with three full days of meals and is meant to be started the morning after the box arrives.
Cindy's Essentials comes with the following 19 items;
Morning Beverage
2 Cold Brew Light
1 Matcha Au Lait
Breakfast
3 Mint Cacao Chip Shakes
Lunch
Shredded Kale Salad
Zen Salad
Super Green Quinoa
Green Juices
Glow
Genius
Clean
Snacks
Spicy Lemon Sprouted Almonds
Sweet Potato Hummus with Crudite
Superfood Trail Mix
Dinner
Veggie Pad Thai
Mediterranean Quinoa Bowl
Zucchini Pasta with Marinara and Hemp Seed Pesto
Raw Soup
Day 1
Each morning started out with a "meal in a bottle" called the Mint Cacao Chip Shake. This was one of my favorite items of the meal plan and I did not mind having it three times. The ingredients consist of almond, banana, cacao, spinach, cashew, mint, vanilla and stevia. I usually do not like stevia, but I could not even taste it in these shakes.
A few hours later, I tried the morning beverage of the day: Cold Brew Light (coffee beans, filtered water, almond milk). While I am a coffee drinker, I take it sweet and creamer. This drink was too bitter for me, so I added some sweetner to it to make it more palatable.
For lunch, I had the ready-to-eat Zen Salad - napa cabbage, kale, red cabbage, carrots, almonds, carrots, sesame seeds with a salad dressing of rice wine vinegar, toasted sesame oil, olive oil, cilantro, ginger, raw agave, garlic and Himalayan sea salt. Lunch was delicious and very filling. I was so happy with lunch that I was excited for what I would be eating for dinner!
Another thing I liked about this meal plan is that it came with snacks! I actually was not even very hungry, which is not usually the case by mid-afternoon. I munched on the Spicy Lemon Almonds, which I didn't particularly care for and the Glow juice (cucumber, celery, spinach, parsley, kale, E3 live and lemon). E3 live is blue-green algae, btw. I really am a fan of green juices, but I hate making them. It takes so long!
Since I was so happy with lunch, I thought I would like dinner for sure, but I didn't. The
Mediterranean Quinoa included quinoa, kale, cucumber, cherry tomato, mint, cilantro, lemon, olive oil, cumin, garlic, cayenne, and Himalayan sea salt. There just seemed to be something missing that would have tied the whole meal together.
Day 2
The morning included the same items as Day 1.
Lunch was the Shredded Kale Salad - kale, romaine, cucumber, carrots, cabbage, beets, hemp seeds with a salad dressing of olive oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon, garlic and Himalayan sea salt. Lunch goes two for two! It was delicious.
The day's afternoon snack was the
Clean juice (cucumber, celery, spinach, parsley, kale, burdock root, dandelion green and lemon), which tasted oddly similar to yesterday's juice, and the
Superfood Trail Mix (sunflower seeds, cashews, goji berries, cacao nibs, pumpkin seeds and inca berries). I had never had inca berries before and I was not a fan. I wound up picking those and the cacao nibs (too bitter) out of the mix.
Dinner, on the other hand, was a home run. I loved the "
Veggie Pad Thai." The "noodles" were made of zucchini, beets, carrots and red peppers with basil, mint and cilantro, and the sauce of coconut cream, almond butter, ginger, Nama shoyu, soy free miso, garlic, lime juice, coconut sugar, cayenne pepper and sea salt was awesome. This was also my first time having zucchini noodles and I am surprised that I am a fan. More surprisingly was that this meal was actually filling!
Day 3
Day 3 began with the Mint Cacao Chip shake again but was followed up by a Matcha Tea Au Lait instead of Cold Brew Light. I enjoyed this drink much more.
Like the previous two lunches, I was very happy with the Super Green Quinoa Bowl. The ingredients consisted of quinoa, kale, rainbow chard, swiss chard, dates, red peppers, olive oil, apple cider vinegar, garlic and sea salt. The dates definitely added some much needed sweetness and texture to the bowl.
My snack for the day was a simple
Sweet Potato Hummus and Veggies platter, which was delicious but so easy for me to make myself that I found it disappointing.
Dinner seemed very big on day 3 compared to the other two days because there were two items: Zucchini Fettuccine with Marinara and Hemp Seed Pesto and Raw Soup. The pasta was so bland that I could not finish it, so I was glad that at least I had something else to eat. The soup was made of carrot juice, avocado, ginger, lemon, cayenne pepper, garlic, soy free miso, basil, olive oil, mint and sea salt. It definitely had a kick and was nice and refreshing.
I was so full throughout the day that I wound up saving my last juice for the weekend. The Genius, again, tasted similar to the other green juices but was made from cucumber, celery, spinach, kale, parsley and lemon.
Overall, the meal plan had highs and lows for me. I loved all of the lunches, the Pad Thai, Matcha Au Lait and Mint Cacao Chip shakes but could do without the other items I received. I also loved that I was eating so healthy these three days and that I felt satisfied and really good the whole time. If I were to order from Urban Remedy again, it would be by mixing and matching to make my own meal plan.
Posted with Blogsy
