We Ate These Foods Every Day For A Week And This Is What Happened

Beer! Beer is brilliant, especially on a hot summer's day. And even better, studies have shown that regularly partaking in a beer or so a day can have some amazing health benefits. According to Piedmont Healthcare, beer could help protect you against kidney stones and lower your chances of suffering a heart attack or stroke. While we can't speak to any of those long-term claims, we can say that some of the other claims completely held up, especially the idea that a beer a day can help reduce stress.

There's something relaxing about popping the top of a can, or the cap of a bottle. Since we opted for our daily beer during dinner prep time, we realized that by about Wednesday, the sound of an opening beer was a sort of signal that made our brains disconnect from the day. Work? The real world? That's behind us, and it's time to relax now. It's beer time!

We also found that there was a bit of a side effect we hadn't been expecting: it helped us eat less. Even one beer is more filling than, say, sipping a lemonade while you're cooking — especially when we made that beer a Guinness. By the time we got around to dinner, we just didn't feel like eating as much, and could opt for one scoop of mac-and-cheese instead of two. After a week of a daily beer, have we kept it up? You betcha.

We already know what happens when you drink espresso every day — it's generally healthy so long as you don't overindulge. But what about Bulletproof coffee, the high-calorie coffee drink that's used by many as a breakfast replacement? According to the Bulletproof Coffee company, the drink works because MCT oil can raise your body's ketone levels while grass-fed butter is a good source of butyrate, vitamin A, beta-carotene, and the fatty acid CLA. Combine those ingredients with antioxidant-rich coffee, and they say the drink will give you "clean-burning energy" for hours.

So we gave it a try, brewing a cup of coffee every morning and blending it with two tablespoons of grass-fed butter and one tablespoon of MCT oil. The drink was thin, but it somehow reminded us of a milkshake (maybe because it contains a ton of fat?). We found ourselves pretty ravenous by the time lunch came around — especially the first few days — but felt like we had slipped into a routine by the end of the week. When the week was over, we were pretty excited to eat solid food for breakfast again, and we can't say we'd want to drink Bulletproof coffee every day for the rest of our lives. But, we did notice that it gave us a bigger energy boost in the morning as compared to drinking plain coffee, so we might use it as a tool to get through particularly busy days.

We know, this sounds absolutely wild. Especially for those die-hard cheese lovers or those who need their favorite creamer in that morning cup of coffee, giving up dairy would be the last thing you'd want to do for an entire week. But it happened. 

In some ways, giving up dairy really isn't all that difficult, especially with so many great dairy substitutes on the market today. Subbing milk or cream in the morning coffee was pretty simple to accomplish with non-dairy creamer. For someone who eats cheese all the time, this might be the hardest part, but it's just a matter of going cold-turkey and trying it out. Along the way, opting dairy-free for a week definitely showcased that there's literally dairy in everything. It's everywhere. So, eliminating it from your diet makes you far more mindful about everything else you're consuming.

The main change noticed after going dairy-free for a week was almost-immediate weight loss. It was like paying attention to anything else being consumed, nutrition labels, etc. didn't matter because eliminating dairy was doing enough to cut back on calories, fats, and carbohydrates. After all, most dairy is full of sugar and fat. Was it a dramatic weight loss strategy? No. But omitting things like cheese, creamer, and ice cream certainly has the potential to go a long way if you're hoping to shed a few pounds. 

There's a lot of reasons a person might decide to go completely (or at least partially) vegetarian, but we still had a bit of a bad taste about the whole idea, largely because of those horrible frozen veggie burgers that were the only option once upon a time. Have things gotten better? Can a carnivore go comfortably meat-free, and feel satisfied?

Absolutely! We started out by picking up a week's worth of "meat" at the store, and yes, we did this for all meals. And it's absolutely possible: from vegetarian sausages for Saturday morning breakfasts to tofu, we got it all.

We admit there was a bit of a learning curve. Not all meat-free products are created equal, and some (we're looking at you, Quorn mince) are delicious in some applications (chili), but not in others (tacos). It's definitely a texture thing, and while there were a few fails (we were still hungry after the taco fail, and filled the hole with a pint of ice cream sorry-not-sorry), there was a lot we were pleasantly surprised about.

Put a Beyond Burger next to a regular meat burger, and we'd be happy with either. Veggie sausages and hot dogs had the same snap and general texture, so it totally worked, and the biggest surprise? Jackfruit. We still haven't come to grips with the sheer weirdness of it. Did we get bored? Not at all. Did we miss meat? A little bit — but we found that it was definitely doable.

Kale is one of those superfoods that has gotten trendier and trendier every year. Before 2012, this leafy green was used as decoration on salad bars and food displays. Today, it's massaged and used instead of lettuce in salads, baked or fried to make low-carb chips, and folded into desserts. As kale-lovers, it wasn't hard for us to want to eat kale every day for a week. And since it's one of those fruits and vegetables that last the longest (up to two weeks when properly stored), there was no reason not to stock up when we went to the grocery store.

When we got home, we washed and chopped the kale into bite-sized pieces, storing it in a plastic bag so it'd be ready to use every day. The easiest way to eat it would have been blending it in our morning smoothie, but we didn't want to hide it. So we tossed a cup of kale leaves into our lunch every day, reheating it with leftovers or massaging it and eating it raw. While we didn't magically become healthier at the end of the week, we did feel pretty good. We also noticed that the kale's protein and fiber content made it really filling. That meant we could eat less for lunch and feel just as satisfied.

We have bees to thank for honey, as they do the work to produce it. Bees harvest nectar from nearby plants, digest it, and basically spit it back out onto honeycomb. From there, humans collect what's in the honeycombs, and bottle sweet, sweet honey.

The beauty of honey is that it's delicious, and it's certainly not hard to add it to your daily diet. One of the best ways to enjoy honey is by adding it to yogurt with granola on top, creating the perfect at-home parfait. Honey is also a great topping for cereal or toast, or in smoothies or tea. But it's not just a tasty treat. Honey is known for being super high in antioxidants, reducing blood pressure, and maybe even improving your skin. But the main benefit we found in consuming honey every day for a week was the way it helped with pesky allergies.

Utilizing local honey, it made an obvious difference in clearing up that annoying sniffy nose and watery eyes. As it turns out, consuming honey from bees who have actually harvested nectar from the same plants you're allergic to can be a total game-changer. It hasn't been scientifically proven to be effective just yet, but the logic seems to make sense — and for us, it seemed to do the trick. For example, if you're having allergy issues due to blooming apple trees, trying honey from bees that harvested from local apple trees might just do the trick. Plus, honey coats your throat as well, leaving it feeling good, allergies or not.