Day 10 was a rather blase day, diet wise.  I had a typical shake for breakfast.  I followed that up with a typical huge salad for lunch.  Mid-to-late afternoon was a huge container of carrots and celery with a heaping serving of the homemade garlic hummus.  I was kind of hungry by dinner time and didn’t have any big things planned so it was a trip to Wegman’s for an assortment of sushi followed by some of that homemmade almond butter fudge for “dessert.”  I entered all of that into the computer and out popped the fact that I was pretty low on several vitamins and minerals.  That’s nothing that a bowl full of pumpkin seeds, almonds and cashews couldn’t take care of.  The problem is that eating that many nuts and seeds at the same time does not make for a happy stomach.

Day 9 is now down and although I was better prepared for the day, the evening proved a bit more difficult.  Dining out on any of these diets is going to be difficult, doing it on Virgin Diet is even more so though, I think.

The last day of the weekend, the first day of the second week of this elimination diet.  It was actually a rather busy day with lots of progress on many fronts, but not all.  Things got off to a bit of a rocky start, but in the end the day finished up pretty solid and satisfying.

Hummus to me seems like one of those impossible foods: something that is good for you, tastes great and easy to make.  I wasn’t actually sure about that third point until today, when I tried my hand at making hummus for the first time.  The results were so outstanding that I think I will add this to the list of things that I will continue to just make from scratch at home from now on.

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.

After nearly a week of barely being able to eat up to my daily calorie burn, although we are still talking about an average difference of about 500 calories a day, I decided I needed to try to eat at least my calorie burn on this eating plan while still maintaining strict adherence to it.  I was able to accomplish it, but believe it or not, it was quite a challenge.

As much as I’m starting to get into the swing of things on some matters, others still cause me a struggle. For example the shakes are constantly giving me little annoyances, like forgetting an ingredient, or not having a big enough container to take, or forgetting to put the coconut milk away when I leave. The same goes for the snacks I like in the morning and afternoon. I just can’t seem to get fully down to not forgetting some or all of them. That notwithstanding, I’m starting to do a lot better with the diet and it’s now just a question of a little self discipline.

I was a little bit better prepared today than I was yesterday.  Maybe that was because I was tired of being tired and hungry, or it was because I actually had several dreams last night about “accidentally” eating the wrong food at restaurants.  Despite my best planning I was still ending the day hungry, so a second dinner and some light snacking made up some of the difference.

To say that the preponderance of available foods at the store and food establishments have the 7 food groups I’m avoiding would be an understatement.  I’d say they all do, but that would be a stretch too, just not as bad.  That unfortunately makes recovering from lack of being prepared pretty difficult, especially three days in.

Day 2 of the Virgin Diet was the first real world test case for me.  The previous times I’ve tried it I’ve either been doing a little trial run or was home-bound.  The real world test proved to be a bit more difficult, especially with no means of just “skipping” it for a moment and then going back to it again.  During each of the diet experiment phases I’m going to try to have zero slip ups.  I am not planning for cheat days, cheat meals or whatever.  A slip up is bound to happen, but those should be accidents not on-purposes.  With that in mind I was able to navigate the landscape but it definitely wasn’t completely carefree or pleasant.