For phasing reasons the beginning of the elimination diet phase begins on Sunday, so I still have four more days to start getting acclimated.  I suppose I could just start things right away, but I’m trying to ease myself into it.  By far the biggest thing to get used to is making these JJ Virgin Health Shakes.  This is now the second time I’ve made them, and this time they actually turned out a bit better.  First, I got a real blender for Christmas, so the actual process of making the shake was a lot smoother than with the stick blender.  On top of that, I now have the correct coconut milk.  I still have a bunch of the sweetened vanilla flavored So Delicious coconut milk, but now I have the unsweetened stuff too.  Considering how much getting used it took the first time I ate one of these things, I figured with the unsweetened version it would have been worse.  In actuality I found this shake to be far more palatable.  Maybe my brain is getting used to the pea protein powder faster than I thought it would.

December has now come and gone and so has the year 2013.  As is typical for most people, including me, the year ended with a lot of excessive indulgences, holiday cheer (aka parties) and enjoying the company of friends and family.  It also ended with me completing one of my life objectives, running a full marathon.  Instead of a month of eating healthy and maintaining a new exercise regiment post-marathon, I instead fell into a regiment of working too much and eating too much crap food.  Thankfully the three months of JJ Virgin’s elimination diet should provide the initial buffer that I was looking for to begin experiments.

Beginning the month of January my body measurements took a predictably bad turn.  Between excessive eating throughout the month as parties, family gatherings and tasty morsels presented themselves throughout the month I picked up a bit of extra weight and girth.  I also didn’t do any exercise after my marathon early in the month.  All of that trends poorly.  Again, I was hoping to not start any of the diet experiment phases with skewed body chemistry and state, but I think the three months of the elimination diet before the core trials begin will make this not a complete tragedy.

What better way to start off a series of diets that discourage the consumption of gluten and grains than by making pasta!  It actually wasn’t my intention to do it on this sort of schedule.  I had been planning on trying to make pasta for several years now, but in the past year I’ve just been getting more and more stoked about the idea.  This led to a nice manual pasta maker and some other utensils showing up on my Amazon wish list.  Thankfully I actually got these things for Christmas.  The timing could be better of course, but I was determined to actually try my hand at making pasta before these items would be verboten for half a year.  The results, in the end anyway, turned out amazing!

My fascinating with food extends far beyond fitness and exercise.  The topics I love range from just the latest cooking techniques to historical recipes.  I think a lot of that comes from my family having a rich cooking tradition, especially since both my parents have great cooking instincts.  There is also the essence of preservation of the foods from my childhood.  As we eat them less and less and as the people that make them pass on they have a real danger of becoming things which will be lost to time.  My mom’s side of the family went through the process of documenting a lot of the family recipes into a nicely bound cook book.  I wish I could say I’ve made more progress cooking my way through it, but I have tried several and they generally turn out much like I remembered them (even if sometimes I have to try it a few times).  Unfortunately not everyone has the same access to graphic design and digital publishing resources that we do.   Thankfully I ran across a site that does that and more, The Family Cookbook Project.

I genuinely appreciate the efforts that people put out in the world to try to help people eat better and live a healthier life.  In my brief period of blogging I’ve already had some cases of things I’ve written been taken in ways I couldn’t have possibly imagined.  I therefore don’t want to be hypercritical in one of those “There’s Someone Wrong On the Internet!" kind of ways.  That being said, I’ve been driven crazy trying to find sources to lay out a legitimate Mediterranean diet.  I’ve managed to cobble together a bunch of recipes and ideas from a few books but I still get a little tweaked when I see yet another article on a “Mediterranean Diet” which is really just telling people to go eat big bowls of pasta and pizza…oh I’m sorry, flat bread. This Huffington Post article by Debbie Gisonni is the latest one to have me shaking my head.

Mindlessly clicking through link after link of holiday food recipes and posts, looking over my own backlog of things to try and simultaneously noticing that my own experiment begins in a little more than two weeks I found myself with what I remembered to be the typically claustrophobic experience of dieting.  Now I remember why in the long run  it never worked for me, and why it probably never worked for anyone else either.

History is replete with examples of food science industry giving us “better than nature” products for us to eat.  I’m sure I could scour Google for a long list or the definitive very first one, but the ones that pop up in my head almost immediately are Crisco and margarine.  These wonder foods to replace old fashioned bacon, lard and tallow were going to revolutionize the food world for the better.  While it certainly made products with unimaginable shelf lives and reduced the cost of production, it also introduced our society to the incredibly unhealthy world of transfats.  Now there is a “better than egg” egg product that is popping up in the news.  Should we embrace it with the same fervor we did Crisco and margarine, or learn the lessons from the past and look at it with some caution?

Anyone that reads the past posts knows that the one thing I struggled with the most in getting ready for this experiment was getting over my diet soda obsession: Coke and Sprite Zero to be exact. Going from 8-12 cans of that stuff a day (yes, a day) to none ever just seemed so daunting.  Fortunately in August I was tripped over the solution in the form of my week long trials for each of the diets.  I have been happy to report that from August 18th until last week I didn’t have a single diet soda of any kind.  Last week that record came to an end, but at least I have some lessons learned out of that too.