2014-06-06
in
4 min read
After a night of restless sleeping, and only a few hours at that, most of the day was spent traveling. A couple of days of good manual labor and little sleep combined to make me feel like I was dragging ass all day, to say nothing for the stresses of the day itself. When on the road diets that don’t substantially mirror the standard American diet can be hard to accommodate. Today was no different, but it wasn’t totally impossible either.
I would say that my day of eating today was Paleo-ish more than strictly Paleo. I didn’t get much of any vegetables, and not a single leaf of any kind much less a huge bowl of them. I didn’t avoid animal products from industrial agriculture, I just couldn’t. Compromise was in order since I didn’t have many options, but many people would have to do that every day that they are on Paleo for financial reasons. So it’s a bit of a learning experience.
Breakfast started out as Paleo McDonald’s style. Reviewing their menu I thought there were two items I could Paleo-ize. The first is their breakfast platter. It comes with eggs, sausage, biscuit and hashbrowns. It’s easy enough to just ditch the biscuit. Technically I can eat potatoes, but I’m almost certain that hashbrown is fried in vegetable oil. While I may not be able to totally avoid vegetable oil in their griddle, something I couldn’t figure out in time, I certainly could avoid a product that was immersion cooked in it for a full minute. The second item I was going to go for was one of the McCafe smoothies. They used to have a berry smoothie which was literally nothing more than berries and ice. Unfortunately that has been replaced with a berry and pomegranate smoothie that has frozen yogurt in it. According to the website you can customize it so it doesn’t have the dairy. However when I tried to order that I was shot down. So breakfast was technically two eggs and a sausage patty.
I tried augmenting that later on with some fruit I could buy at a convenience store but all they had were some pretty sad looking apples and oranges. The oranges looked nice but I didn’t want to deal with the headache of peeling them. I brought along some almonds and I had had a carrot earlier in the day, so between those two plus breakfast I rounded out my eating until early afternoon.
By the time we got back into my home area we were pretty starving, and it was after 2 pm. We decided to go to Qdoba, a restaurant I had never been to. It definitely had a lot of elements that reminded me of a Chipotle. I figured out that some of their meats actually have dairy in them or are fried in soybean oil. Chipotle also uses soybean oil, but for some reason the Paleo crowd doesn’t shy away from eating there so I decided I could eat the meat with the soybean oil but not the dairy. I started with their salad, doubled up the meat, added some fajita vegetables and pico de gallo. I then had them top the whole thing off with a big dollop of guacamole. It was an overall filling lunch which held me over to dinner.
I took a bit of a catnap as the last couple days caught up with me. I was really dragging ass by dinner time even after the nap, but I rallied through dinner. That was yet more restaurant food in the form of Famous Dave’s Memphis style baby back ribs and some broccoli. I actually got a little energy from that, but not too much. A few hours later a big bowl of frozen blueberries and pineapple topped off the day of eating.
I thankfully had no caffeine symptoms all day, that I could tell anyway. I gave myself a headache and figured I was tired from the lack of sleep and the work. Maybe it was another day of caffeine related symptoms, but I think it was just me earning these maladies today. I therefore didn’t have any caffeine. I hopefully won’t need a jolt tomorrow either, but what I will need is some good stretching and maybe some yoga to work out these tight muscles, especially in my back.