After a month of eating cleanly and getting some exercise, but not as much as I would like, my measurements have snapped back to the way they were before the end of year binge.  Depending on the measurement they have gone back even as far as before my October holiday binge as well.  I knew I had dropped a bunch of weight on this Virgin Diet.  That isn’t completely intentional.  Since I put on three pounds of excess weight during the holidays, I wanted to shed it over the first three months of the year.  It seems that I’ve done that in the first month plus a little more. I hope that levels off some, but unless I’m eating a ton of excess nuts, nut butters or oil it is really hard to bump up the calories enough to avoid more than a nominal calorie deficit eating this way.  I was glad to see that what little yoga and calisthenics I did do, which will hopefully ramp up in the next couple of weeks, already showed some gains on my arms.  It is amazing how fast things improve when you start from doing nothing at all :-).

I’m not the type of person that needs to eat sandwiches and burgers on a daily basis.  However Every once in a while it’s a nice thing to have.  Obviously with no gluten products until July that’s not going to happen.  Besides that everything was just an ordinary day of eating.

The third week of the Virgin Diet phase of the experiment is almost gone.  Juggling a very tight and busy work schedule combined with not using any of my usual pacifiers proved a bit of a challenge, but it was one that I actually did well against in the end.

With a busy day of business meetings I didn’t have too much time to fit in my typical meals.  I started the day with the usual shake which I had to drink on my drive to my first appointment.  Lunch was an amazingly large salad which only held me until mid-afternoon.  Ironically while I wasn’t hungry at all around noon, by the time I got lunch twenty minutes later I was practically light headed.  I’m not sure what is up with that, but I do know I felt better after lunch.

The Northeast/Mid-Atlantic had their taste of some real snow, which meant cocooning in the house doing “work” work while regularly going out to shovel.  There will be a snowblower for the next storm!  Until then it was more a neighborly effort to keep shoveling before it got too deep since three houses share a 250 foot driveway.  Despite all that I was able to get some good eating in and to try a new way of cooking chicken.

Today I woke up feeling about the same as I did yesterday morning, and it continued through the afternoon and evening.  It’s nothing horrific but enough to be a nuisance and for me to try to avoid contact with people.  Sadly due to poor schedule management on my part my diet for the day wasn’t altogether bad, but it wasn’t that diverse either.

I had gone to bed feeling a bit dehydrated and woke up with a splitting headache.  On a Sunday morning when I wasn’t abstaining from alcohol that would have been a clear indication I had too much alcohol the night before, which sadly with my metabolism can be as little as three beers sometimes.  I tried nursing it off but to no avail, so I just kept trying some nourishment to fill in the gaps and lots of water/seltzer trying to fight it down.