Day 3 - Things Get Grumpy

I finally woke up without a headache. I almost felt like dancing around!

By noon, however, the headache creeped back and hovered over me like a threat. My head just felt fuzzy and full of rocks all day. My neck has been sore and that doesn't help.

Have I talked about my body, yet? Aside from the headaches? Well, it's been sore. And not that good kind of day-after-workout sore. It was I-can't-get-off-the-toilet sore. For two days my muscles were so sore after just one Perfect Posterior workout that I was walking as if I had a debilitating degenerative muscle disease. I looked and felt stupid.

Thank goodness I work at home. I convinced my 3 year old to crawl into bed with me and read for a while. Hey, it was snowing! Under the duvet was the coziest place to be!

I started off the day with the usual breakfast variant: scrambled eggs, salsa, refried beans and two slices of bacon.

For lunch I made a big salad with veggies (cucumber, broccoli, grape tomatoes, red and green pepper) plus chickpeas and a yummy yogurt based dressing. On the side there were some olives and a pickle.

Later in the afternoon, I had a snack of nuts.

I guess there wasn't enough protein in my lunch because, by the time I was preparing dinner, I was starved and cranky. So, I had another baggie of nuts. I only ate half, tho. I saved the other half for after supper.

Supper was a yummy soup. I took some frozen turkey stock, the jus of a slow-cooked pork shoulder, half of the pork shoulder shredded up, a carrot, celery, onion and a can of black-eyed peas. With a few herbs, salt and pepper this turned out to be a super delicious, super nutritious meal. Even the kids gobbled it up.

The afternoon and evening were not good in terms of my mood. I was snappy and just plain mean at points. I wasn't hungry, but I got resentful at not being able to eat what I want, when I want. It made me angry to peel oranges for the boys but not be able to eat a few slices with them. It made me grumpy not to be able to reward some hard work around the house with a handful of grapes. And I was purely nasty about not having a glass of Diet Pepsi to relax with at night.

This is my hardest problem, I think: adjusting my thinking about being entitled to eat what I want. I mean, I am an adult and if I want something, I can just go get it. My problem has been that I indulge that feeling all the time. I rarely wait for anything or restrict my desires. If I want a skein of yarn or a Snickers bar I just go get one.

Well, I just can't do that anymore. I have to wait for Magic Day. The only problem is that Saturday is not today!

Day 2 - Food

I woke up with a headache. I tried extra food, extra water and Tylenol, but nothing touched it. I had that headache when I woke up and it was still there when I went to bed.

Being in pain makes everything unappealing.

We started the day out with our usual breakfast of scrambled eggs, salsa, guacamole and black beans. I forgot to take a picture.

The nice thing is that this breakfast is great at keeping me filled up till lunch. I very rarely feel hungry before noon, now. If I do get the urge, I try to make a cup of tea or drink some cold water and wait it out.

I was really looking forward to lunch.

While I prepped my salad, I ate a can of sardines in tomato sauce. Oh gods of food, this was delicious! I love me some saucy sardines!

My main dish was a tuna veggie salad. Normally I would make this with pasta or use it as a sandwich filler, but both are verbotten, so I ate it with a fork!

One can of tuna was blended with broccoli, red and green pepper, green onion, celery, pickle, mayo and mustard powder. I only managed to get halfway through the bowl.

You can see my tea "cup" in that photo, too. I have been drinking my tea with cinnamon, like a good girl. It tastes like crap, though. I drink tea. With a little sweet in it. It can be cane sugar, or honey, I don't care. And it doesn't have to be a lot. And tho I love cinnamon flavoured teas like Chai teas, cinnamon is not an adequate substitute for me.

I'm going to have a look at Stevia and see what the profile is on that. It might be worth it for me.

I needed comfort food later in the afternoon, so I grabbed one of the pre-portioned baggies of nuts that I made up on the weekend. Raw almonds and roasted and salted cashews. It works out to about 1/3 Cup of nuts, which is a good portion, I think.

Nuts are a good snack food, if you can stick to a reasonable portion - which is why I bag them up. You know how the day after you eat nuts you see them, er, on the way out? Practically whole? Well, a recent study discovered that almost half of the nuts eaten get expelled without getting digested. That means only half of the fat and calories are sticking around. The rest gets flushed away. Check out this story for more info.

While I was getting an after school snack for my kids, I popped a couple olives into my mouth. I didn't get a picture. I was curious about whether I was getting enough fat: maybe the reason for my headache was related to not getting enough good fats into my system. The brain is made of fat, after all.

The headache didn't go away. But, boyo, those were a few tasty olives! Plus garlic cloves. Gotta have garlic stuffed olives! That's the easiest way I know, aside from a supplement, to get whole cloves eaten.

Dinner was pulled pork with a little bit of BBQ sauce. I only used 2 or 3 TBSPs and the pork was divided over four people, so I didn't worry about the carbs too much. The pork was accompanied by lentils with garlic powder, peas, brussel sprouts and broccoli.

OK, I don't mind lentils, per se. But plain lentils are just plain gross. I'm going to have to get making a few soups, because I don't think I can eat lentils or beans plain like that. It makes me gaggy.

I drank a tonne of water all day and practically floated to bed. With the headache. Ugh.

Day 1 - Food

It's not quite 8pm but I'm ready for bed. I can barely keep my eyes open. I don't know if that is because of the change in foods, the exercise or me. And, I realise that I could technically cave between now and whenever bedtime really is, but I'm doubting it.

I'm calling this one and it was successful. Not necessarily easy. Though, not hard either.

Let's just say that I now officially hate shopping. 80% of the supermarket is made up of foods I cannot eat. Sure, I could eat them Saturday, but Saturday is so far away at this point as to not even exist. And so, when it comes right down to it, I cannot eat so many delicious things. Even if they are "healthy" or whole foods.

By the time I had made it across the entire store and was passing the bakery on my way to the checkout, I was ready to call it quits on the whole thing, order a cake and have a shame party. "I can order a birthday cake for myself on Saturday!" I declared with false bravado. My birthday is nearly two months away.

I didn't buy any cake. Or soda pop. Or fruit.

I bought beans.

Here is what we ate today.

Breakfast was an omelet with spinach, French cream mushrooms, green onion and 1/3 cup of chevrette cheese. No beans anywhere!

I tried using cinnamon in my tea for the first time today. I'm a big fan of chai, but this wasn't much like chai. It made sugar-less tea tolerable but, well, it wasn't the best thing I've ever drank. I suppose, after some time, I will come to prefer this, the same way I came to prefer black tea after a lifetime of drinking it with milk.

Since we had a very late start to the day, our breakfast was actually our lunch. So, when we were at the grocery store around 4:30pm, I started to get shaky and distractible. It was kind of strange. I got clumsy and a bit panicky. I had bought raw almonds and roasted cashews as a snack so while my husband paid up, I ripped into the bag and gobbled back a handful. It seemed to help.

Also for snacking, I picked up a jar of hazelnut spread. It's made of just roasted hazelnuts so it's compliant. Other folks are eating "natural" peanut butter, but - maybe because of my impending case of the hungries - when I stood staring at all the options - almond butter, cashew butter, pumpkin seed butter... - I couldn't help myself and went for the hazelnut butter. Maybe I'll add cocoa powder to it for a compliant "nutella"!

I had a TBSP of that when I got home, too.

Dinner was easy tonight. I made my easy-peasy chili. You can find the recipe here. Scroll right down to the bottom of the post to find it. Instead of two cans of soup, use a large can, or two, of tomato sauce and add extra cans of beans. This is going to be an easy meal to re-heat this week and to pack off with my husband for lunches.

I'm trying to keep up with my water intake. We bought these large litre+ bottles from WalMart the other day and they are perfect.

In the morning, I'll probably go back to scrambled eggs, but then I'll have to make a packed lunch for my 7 year old. Can I keep my hands off his grapes and oranges? Will I be able to resist a sampling of the kiwi-jam my baker sent home to us this weekend? When will I stop feeling deprived?

Breakfast: 4HB Huevos Rancheros and a Recipe

Though we are in holiday mode right now, normally breakfast is a hurried affair. I have to make breakfast for my husband and the little at 7am so that they can be out of the house at 8am. I am not a morning person.

Over the last few months I've generally made oats, most often Scotch and steel cut oats (or Scoats) and then like a sundae bar, there are a number of things to add: cinnamon, shredded coconut, raisins, chocolate chips, various seeds and nuts, etc. Everyone had their own preferences and it was easy to throw a cup of soaked oats into a pot with some milk and let it go while I made lunches and got people dressed.

Now I can't eat grains. And a full fry up is out of the question for a weekday so scrambled eggs and omelettes it is. The easiest of all is Huevos Rancheros style eggs. So yummy!  Whether I can eat that for half of all my breakfast for the next month, six months, year, lifetime... Well, that'll remain to be seen.

I scramble whole double-yoke eggs - two each per adult and one each per child - with a slurp of milk and a good dollop of butter. Over the top I add a tablespoon or two of black beans (though it could be pinto or whatever is on hand) a couple tablespoons of mild salsa and a couple tablespoons of guacamole.

If I had refried beans on hand, I could use them. I could even add some meat like a small handfull of chorizo, pulled pork or shredded chicken.

The key to it all is pre-portioning things like the guacamole, beans and any leftover meats. I use little containers meant for handmade baby food, freeze them and pop them in the microwave while I scramble the eggs up. It couldn't be easier!

Easy Guacamole

2 large, ripe avocadoes
2 cloves of garlic minced
1 tsp sea salt
1 TBSP lemon juice (or the juice of half a lemon, fresh)

Mash all the ingredients together (after peeling and pitting the appropriate parts). Done.