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 :-).

I’m not the type of person that needs to eat sandwiches and burgers on a daily basis.  However Every once in a while it’s a nice thing to have.  Obviously with no gluten products until July that’s not going to happen.  Besides that everything was just an ordinary day of eating.

The third week of the Virgin Diet phase of the experiment is almost gone.  Juggling a very tight and busy work schedule combined with not using any of my usual pacifiers proved a bit of a challenge, but it was one that I actually did well against in the end.

With a busy day of business meetings I didn’t have too much time to fit in my typical meals.  I started the day with the usual shake which I had to drink on my drive to my first appointment.  Lunch was an amazingly large salad which only held me until mid-afternoon.  Ironically while I wasn’t hungry at all around noon, by the time I got lunch twenty minutes later I was practically light headed.  I’m not sure what is up with that, but I do know I felt better after lunch.