Tuesday, June 17, 2014–As I stated yesterday, I was really craving the notion of having a big salad for breakfast. Yeah, it’s bizarre but there was something about it that I found enjoyable. Yesterday’s meeting schedule made it impractical but today’s more than allowed for it. Starting the day with a huge helping of kale, cabbage, mushrooms and carrots worked beautifully to get the day started and kept me more than full through lunch time.

While I’m not thoroughly exhausted, the perpetual yawning throughout the day got old really quick.  I think I nailed down what it was, the next question is if I want to fix it or not.

Today was a day with travel home to spend some time with my dad on Father’s Day.  As such I went back to my go-to travel plans on most of my meals.  As I’m finally working through my backlog of squashes I decided to crack open another one tonight and whip up a quick meal of Shrimp Marinara over spaghetti (squash).

Eating a whole foods diet, whether it is paleo, vegan or anything in between, can be a laborious process in terms of the volumes of vegetables that you are eating.  I love vegetables, so that doesn’t bother me much.  I actually enjoy the challenge in the same way I enjoy distance running.  Since most people don’t enjoy either of those two things, you can see why many paleo people turn into the “bacon and steak with a side of broccoli” paleo-vores and vegans can fall into the processed food trap.  Not only do you want to get a lot of vegetables you want a diversity of vegetables.  If all you are eating is pound after pound of broccoli you aren’t doing as well as you may think, but still much better than most people.  Salads are a great way to get size and variety of vegetables in your diet.

As I said at the end of Day 13, I was going to seriously buckle down and get back to some good whole foods clean eating.  That is exactly what I did and I threw in some exercise (finally!) to boot.

The end of the second week is now coming quickly.  It’s becoming a bit tiresome to explain schedule problems for poor eating, but it is what I grapple with.  I just need to shift some stuff around to fix, but I didn’t.  While it wasn’t a totally horrible eating day, it wasn’t the best either.  It may have been technically compliant, but not really.

Most of the friends and coworkers I talk to about my diet experiment don’t exactly understand what I’m trying to do, but they are supportive.  Because the word “diet” has taken on the perception of something you do to lose weight quickly, it can be a bit jarring to hear I’m going to “diet” for 1.5 years.  People also like to shake their head at my self-induced dietary restrictions, but always in jest.  Thankfully due to a meeting I had downtown I had the opportunity to dine with some friends that are on the Paleo bandwagon and have been for quite some time.

I seem to be dropping in meal frequency, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Just a factor of schedule and timing, today I found myself without any snacks or breakfast.  It was therefore just two big meals for me today.  I really struggled between lunch and dinner, but I didn’t overeat in the end anyway.

With another hectic day I once again ended up skipping breakfast and jumping right to lunch.  I had a hangout planned around pizza that everyone was thankfully accommodating on.  Overall it was a very calorie light day, but one that ended still Paleo pure.