dukan diet: cruise phase

The cruise phase of the dukan diet is a long phase, and you are supposed to stay in this phase until you reach your goal weight. So we are both still in this phase (the last two weeks we were awful about sticking to the cruise phase...we may have ruined everything). 

The point of this phase is to start introducing more vegetables into your diet. If you remember from phase one of this diet the "attack phase" (full post here) then you know so far the diet has been all protein! 

The vegetables that are allowed include a wide variety, but of course the starchy vegetables are not allowed. 

The rules of this phase are that you have to:

alternate in a few pure protein days a week with the days that you incorporate vegetables

continue drinking 1.5 L of water

continue oat bran every morning

walk 30 minutes a day

The 4 weeks we had been in this phase before we messed it up, we noticed that the dramatic weight loss from phase one had slowed down. In phase two we were at an average of 1-1.5 lbs a week of weight loss.

We've learned that this diet works, and it works well. After five weeks I was down 11 pounds from when I started, and Jake has lost about the same. Unfortunately, with my two weeks of cheating I'm only down 5 lbs from when I started the diet when I checked this morning.

We don't feel limited at all in this stage as far as hunger goes. Jake enjoyed this phase much better because he could introduce salads. Some of our favorite meals include cooking taco meat turkey inside Anaheim peppers with fresh pico on top, zucchini noodles, hot wings, buffalo chicken dip inside of peppers baked in the oven, and steaks. We ate a lot, and drank a lot of water and lost weight because of how little carbs we were eating.

The biggest challenge we've faced, is that after 5 weeks we just felt bored and because we had done so well for so long we didn't care how often we cheated if we went out to eat or ordered take out on the weekends. To be more successful, it's important to not cheat as much. The weight will come back on quick the more you cheat! 

Read more about this diet in the book here: http://amzn.to/2ic2HMo