2014-01-12
in
6 min read
Today was the last day of the first week, and overall things felt good. I had to navigate a happy hour and a dinner, but came through squeaky clean. I also started doing some analysis for the first week and realized I needed to balance out some vitamins and minerals, but that was fine since I still had more eating to do by the end of the night.
Guess what the day started of with? If you guessed a shake you’d be half right. Of course it was a shake, but I had some bacon to go along with it too. We got another order of bacon from Hometown Harvest, and this one was from another farm, so I just had to try it. Besides, I needed to start boosting my calories to hit a balanced calorie day again. After the massive amount of eating at the end of yesterday I actually woke up with a still full stomach. I still managed to fit down all of the shake plus the bacon. For this shake everything was the same except I switched the protein powder flavor from vanilla to chocolate. It actually tasted pretty much the same but not as sweet. I was hoping the sweetish pea aftertaste would be masked so I could try to get other people to try the shake without the warnings about the after taste. I can’t say it did that as effectively as I had hoped.
Having finally gotten fed up with being overly sedentary for the last few months I decided to do a yoga routine followed by starting my build up to 100 pushups and 10 pull-ups. Sadly by the end of the yoga routine my arms were already weak and the few pushup type moves I did proved my arms have really atrophied in the intervening months of me not doing anything besides running (and not even doing that the past month or so). Ah well, I got my decent amount of yoga in, so it was time for an enormous salad.
I bought a huge bag of baby kale and mixed greens from Costco about a week ago and it really needs to have a dent made in it. I therefore filled a huge metal mixing bowl almost all the way to the top with the mix. On top of that I added a few carrots, a third of an onion, some leftover sauteed asparagus from the night before, salmon, spices a whole bunch of extra virgin olive oil and some vinegar. I’ve gotten used to eating the salads without the bread chaser, which means my stomach is otherwise pretty much okay without the bread absorbing up some of the juices.
I was going to a happy hour for the rest of the afternoon, so I had a handful of almonds to hold me over until dinner time. The happy hour was relatively easy to navigate. Despite everyone around me having beer, mixed drinks and sodas, I stuck with my seltzer water and regular water. The place that the happy hour was at didn’t have a soda fountain however, so that means having to pay two bucks for every “drink” I ordered. That was frustrating, but not as frustrating as if they didn’t have nice fizzy drinks without artificial sweeteners. The bigger thing that was tempting to me were the snack-ems at the bar which looked ever more appealing as I got hungrier through the afternoon. Some peanut M&M’s (my favorite by the way), absolutely not. Some “snack mix” full of lovely baked crackers and what not, again not in the cards. A bowl of nuts, that may work. Oh damn, more peanuts plus covered in sugar. It’s not like I was literally starving to death or even especially hungry, I was just looking for some flavor besides seltzer and water.
Dinner was a bit later than I had originally imagined, so I had a handful of grapes in the early evening. We tried a new restaurant out called Gadsby’s that last year had taken up residence where a former restaurant used to live. The menu looked delicious but out of the entire thing it was apparent that only a few items would pass the criteria of the diet. Still some I wasn’t too sure about so I had to make sure the waiter made sure I didn’t get any dairy with my food, “or butter” I would say in case in their haste they hadn’t remembered that butter is a dairy product. That sounds condescending, but I had been given that advice from a vegan article which stated that this is a common mess up. It turns out neither the mushroom and shrimp soup nor any of the elements on the filet dish had any dairy, so we were good to go.
The restaurant overall was quite nice. I didn’t get a chance to look over their wine menu since I can’t drink any alcohol at this point in time. The soup came out in a large bowl with only the bottom full of the meaty portobello mushrooms and some shrimp. It was supposed to have a smokey broth, but the smoke was a bit on the overpowering side. One of the shrimp was also slightly overcooked, but the overall idea was a good one. When the main course came out it was a plate full of filet with mushroom wine reduction, roasted fingerling potatoes and braised savoy cabbage. All of that was absolutely delicious and the steak was cooked exactly as ordered. The only thing missing was a nice red to help wash it down with, but overall it was a win.
Having recently discovered that the past several days I had been short on some nutrients (I’ll blog about that in the weekly summary) I decided to watch my levels like a hawk today. With all of that eating I still had plenty of calories to go but still needed to bump up my iron, thiamin and zinc just a little bit. That’s nothing that two handfuls of pecans, a bowl of berries and half a mango didn’t solve though.
My energy levels today were pretty typical for a Saturday. I love slow weekends, and this was no exception. I did wake up feeling a little off, but I think that had more to do with the stuffing my face until nearly bedtime last night than anything else. Overall I think I ended up finishing the first week pretty strong, and with no reservations about getting into the second week of the Virgin Diet.