I’m surprised at how fast the months of the experiment are flying by.  It seems like I just started the Virgin Diet a couple weeks ago, yet I’m now almost through with the testing phase and getting ready to move onto the first real diet phase, The Paleo Diet.  While life got in the way of some of the process, I mostly adhered to what I was trying to do with the testing and did get some interesting results.

Yesterday was supposed to be the first day of me testing soy in my diet.  Instead it turned into a bit of a binge on junk food literally containing almost everything I’m supposed to be avoiding.  Everything started off okay, with my usual (compliant) shake.  I then had sushi for lunch with soy sauce, which went fine.  The rest of the day was a devolving train wreck.

Another test week down, another example of how things that I thought may be bothering me really aren’t.  Granted I didn’t think I was having any major adverse reactions to any of these seven foods, but I did keep an open mind to the possibility.  In the end though, I think eggs passed without a doubt but I also think it is proving that the minor gluten issues were just that, issues and not being caused by something else.

As with the dairy test week, this is unfortunately probably tainted by the medicines and recovering from the surgery.  That probably means I should do a second round of test week later in this experiment, but from what I’ve found so far I think that I at least have some adverse reactions to the consumption of gluten.

I’ve seen this article a few times now, but never felt the urge to comment on it until now.  Perhaps it was because I just segued from the “Biggest Loser” article, or perhaps it was because I’m getting claustrophobic from not being plowed out yet.  The big question we can ask ourselves is “what composition are we?”

The year I first moved into my current house was the year of “Snowmageddon” or “Snowpocalypse”, which ever you prefer.  The winter season started off with a good 15-18 inch snow storm that shut the place down for several days.  The Pennsylvania, Maryland, DC, Virginia region really doesn’t know how to deal with snow at those levels.  On top of that four of our houses are responsible not only for clearing our own driveways but the road that leads up to our houses, which is about 250 feet.  With our neighbor’s small snow blower as long as you kept the snow levels to 6-8 inches everything was fine.  Thankfully we were all able to do just that.  The same couldn’t be said for the truly ridiculous levels of snow we had a few leeks later.  Fifteen to eighteen inches is bad, but 2-3 feet is off the charts.  Our area was shut down for a week, but we were left to hand shovel that snow, which drifted up to four feet in some areas, by hand!

I’ve been on hiatus from blogging for a couple of weeks but now that the diet experiment weeks are in full effect things are changing up and can get interesting.  I skipped the end of the pure abstinence phase, Week 4.  I have all the data but the end results can be summed up as “more of the same.”  The dairy trial week is another matter, although I’m probably going to have to do it again for reasons that will be obvious shortly.  Based on the initial results however, I’d say that I don’t have any sensitivity to dairy, which is somewhat surprising to me.

I intend to, and have intended to, go over the details of the various blood tests that I’ve been conducting at quarterly intervals for almost a year now.  I even have some tests that go back to 2010.  The point of the tests are to look at how my body is reacting to the diet/lifestyle that I was previously on.  While I will one day go into the gory details of each one, I just received the results of my tests back in December, and the numbers, I thought, were pretty incredible.

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 :-).