MARCH CHALLENGE | Avoiding the bakeries

In April of 2020, I decided to finish ten 30 days challenges this year, to help me develop some good habits, change some bad ones, get more creative and so on. You can see the list of all 10 challenges in my original post, and in this one, I write more about the one I am doing this March. Yes, I came up with the idea in April, and still managed to do a challenge in March, because it coincided with the Lent, which I usually skip, but this year decided to take the opportunity and try not to eat store-bought baked goods for 40 days.

AVOIDING THE BAKERIES

30 DAYS CHALLENGE FOR MARCH 2020

My favorite things to eat are bread and pastries. I love bread first thing in the morning, I love bread with lunch (even if I eat pasta!), I love pastry with afternoon coffee and I love bread for dinner. All in all – too much bread and pastry. This all resulted in gaining weight, of course. So for this year’s lent, I decided to give up anything that could be bought in bakeries and pastry shops (making it a 40 days challenge!). Since I’m writing this in April, I can say I succeeded in this challenge, but with few changes to my plan.

I read an article, about two weeks into my challenge, which had an interesting idea about dieting. It goes something like this: “you can eat whatever you want, as long as you make it yourself“. So, if I want chocolate croissants in the morning, I have to make them myself. I really like this idea, since I was never able to fully give up on some of my favorite foods, and this would give me a chance to still eat them, while also improving my cooking and baking skills. So, I did eat bread during this period, but only one I made and mostly without yeast. I call that a successful challenge!

What I’ve noticed after finishing this challenge is that I don’t need bread and pastry as much – even though I can eat it since my challenge is over, I still opt-out. Maybe I actually managed to develop a good habit!

So, for each of the challenges, I set up a rewards system to keep me motivated, and here is what I rewarded myself with for a successful March challenge!

WORDPRESS BLOG & DOMAIN

REWARD FOR SUCCESSFULLY FINISHING MARCH CHALLENGE

I had a blog before (started in 2014) which was a collection of my DIYs, travels and so on, but I wasn’t very regular in writing, my photos were terrible, and eventually, I just gave up on maintaining it. Now, I feel like I need a place to write down my ideas, thoughts and just random gibberish, so I decided to try it once again. This time, I bought my own drifter domain and voila! I wrote 5 blog posts before even publishing website, and I have 5 more in the making. I will give myself a year before prolonging my domain, to see if this is something that benefits me in any way (not financially, of course, but rather personally).

Did you ever do a challenge like this one? What foods would you like to cut down on? Let me know in the comments!