And now, onto the final “challenge” of my Beachbody Ultimate Reset.  At the beginning of this process, I identified a number of situations that I would be in during the 21 days of the Reset that would be particularly challenging.  Today, I completed the final one – the Reset during mourning and a funeral service.

• Challenge 1 / Week 1:  The Reset at work.
• Challenge 2 / Week 1:  The Reset at a conference.
• Challenge 3 / Week 2:  The Reset at a retirement dinner.
• Challenge 4 / Week 2:  The Reset at a 24-hour Oscar-nominated best pictures marathon (in a movie theater).
• Challenge 5 / Week 3:  The Reset during mourning and a funeral service.

The morning started as planned – with a fresh fruit plate for breakfast.  Then, the family embarked on a very beautiful, sad, and difficult funeral service for a very close family member.  While pre-Reset, we most certainly would have comforted ourselves in this situation with alcohol and a heavy meal, we resisted pretty well.  After the service, we attended a late lunch/early dinner at a wonderful restaurant that had our whole party seated in a private mezzanine, with a slideshow to honor the deceased, an open bar, trays of appetizers (the largest shrimp I’ve ever seen, frankfurters with sauerkraut, crab cake sliders, cheese, bread), and trays of desserts (milkshake shooters, miniature flourless chocolate cakes, fruit tarts, and cream puffs).  Wow, did everything look amazing!  My husband and I didn’t touch a thing.  We ordered a market greens salad, hold the chicken, no dressing, with oil and vinegar on the side.  I had this salad in lieu of the day 17 lunch included in the Reset book (i.e., Moroccan carrot salad, 3 cups of greens, and dressing).  The salad was absolutely wonderful and absolutely Reset-friendly, though a little small; I think I would have gotten to eat more food on the Reset lunch.  Anyway, the salad came with local greens, carrots, fennel, radish, and herbs (dill, I think).  It was very hard to say “no” to all of the booze flowingly freely and amazing food floating around, which all smelled wonderful, but I kept reminding myself that I don’t HAVE TO have any of it, the only person who can break the Reset for myself is ME, no one is going to shove a milkshake shooter down my throat, so I stuck to it.  I can always go back to the restaurant some other day.  It’s just across the river.  Whew, what a challenge!

In general, during sad times, I find it best to avoid alcohol.  Keep it as a celebratory enhancer.  In times of sadness, alcohol has a way of either numbing your emotions so that you cannot properly deal with them, thus hindering you from fully grieving, or it amplifies your emotions so that they run wild and out of control.  I think it’s best, based on the Reset and past experience, to just experience the pain and grief fully.  It makes you stronger and helps with the healing process.

Back to the food – the salad was nice, but we were definitely hungry when dinner time rolled around (the others who indulged at the restaurant were not).  I cooked dinner for my husband and me – roasted acorn squash with green beans and lemon.  While the Reset recipe book calls for delicata squash, the only squash that my grocery store had were acorn and butternut, and the recipe book says that you can substitute any squash, so I went with acorn.  This was actually my husband’s favorite meal that he has had on the Reset!  The acorn squash was baked in the oven and then topped with lemon juice, olive oil, and Bragg’s Liquid Aminos.  I had some other curry spices to add some more flavor (pink salt, black pepper, cumin, red cayenne, and coriander).

Day 17 Dinner

Tomorrow is going to be hard.  We are going to be doing some sightseeing with some relatives who are here in DC for the first time.  I will be skipping both of the Reset meals planned for tomorrow (lunch and dinner), and instead searching for healthy choices.  Dinner should be fine – we have reservations somewhere I know can give us a great salad.  Lunch, well, that might be Challenge #6.