After a pretty busy week with a lot of eating out, I ended the work week doing more of the same.  I think I may have had a minor slip up but interestingly (or sadly) I don’t think it affected me one iota.  Overall best intentions were still met, and I sort of treated Friday (as I will Saturday) as a bit of a “cheat day” without actually violating any of the rules of the elimination diet.

Since my schedule kind of sucks in terms of making time to cook, I’ve been relying heavily on eating out this week.  Today is no exception.  Tomorrow and Saturday won’t be either.  I’ve learned my lesson from the past and just plan ahead a bit to get around the problems.  In so doing I’ve nailed down the whole restaurant experience, at least where I can find at least one item I can eat, or at least modify, from the entree section.

A busy day of work meant that most of my meals, actually all but breakfast, were going to be eating out.  A little homework ahead of time made that process a bit more streamlined than it has been in the past though.

With one week of the elimination diet now behind me I wanted to do a summary of how things are going so far.  I think as the diets unfold it’s good to look at the state of the nutrition, how I was feeling, if there were any problems et cetera.  So while this is important, I also think it’s good practice for the real deal.

Day 10 was a rather blase day, diet wise.  I had a typical shake for breakfast.  I followed that up with a typical huge salad for lunch.  Mid-to-late afternoon was a huge container of carrots and celery with a heaping serving of the homemade garlic hummus.  I was kind of hungry by dinner time and didn’t have any big things planned so it was a trip to Wegman’s for an assortment of sushi followed by some of that homemmade almond butter fudge for “dessert.”  I entered all of that into the computer and out popped the fact that I was pretty low on several vitamins and minerals.  That’s nothing that a bowl full of pumpkin seeds, almonds and cashews couldn’t take care of.  The problem is that eating that many nuts and seeds at the same time does not make for a happy stomach.

Day 9 is now down and although I was better prepared for the day, the evening proved a bit more difficult.  Dining out on any of these diets is going to be difficult, doing it on Virgin Diet is even more so though, I think.

The last day of the weekend, the first day of the second week of this elimination diet.  It was actually a rather busy day with lots of progress on many fronts, but not all.  Things got off to a bit of a rocky start, but in the end the day finished up pretty solid and satisfying.

Hummus to me seems like one of those impossible foods: something that is good for you, tastes great and easy to make.  I wasn’t actually sure about that third point until today, when I tried my hand at making hummus for the first time.  The results were so outstanding that I think I will add this to the list of things that I will continue to just make from scratch at home from now on.

Today was the last day of the first week, and overall things felt good.  I had to navigate a happy hour and a dinner, but came through squeaky clean.  I also started doing some analysis for the first week and realized I needed to balance out some vitamins and minerals, but that was fine since I still had more eating to do by the end of the night.

After nearly a week of barely being able to eat up to my daily calorie burn, although we are still talking about an average difference of about 500 calories a day, I decided I needed to try to eat at least my calorie burn on this eating plan while still maintaining strict adherence to it.  I was able to accomplish it, but believe it or not, it was quite a challenge.