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.

As much as I’m starting to get into the swing of things on some matters, others still cause me a struggle. For example the shakes are constantly giving me little annoyances, like forgetting an ingredient, or not having a big enough container to take, or forgetting to put the coconut milk away when I leave. The same goes for the snacks I like in the morning and afternoon. I just can’t seem to get fully down to not forgetting some or all of them. That notwithstanding, I’m starting to do a lot better with the diet and it’s now just a question of a little self discipline.

I was a little bit better prepared today than I was yesterday.  Maybe that was because I was tired of being tired and hungry, or it was because I actually had several dreams last night about “accidentally” eating the wrong food at restaurants.  Despite my best planning I was still ending the day hungry, so a second dinner and some light snacking made up some of the difference.

To say that the preponderance of available foods at the store and food establishments have the 7 food groups I’m avoiding would be an understatement.  I’d say they all do, but that would be a stretch too, just not as bad.  That unfortunately makes recovering from lack of being prepared pretty difficult, especially three days in.

Day 2 of the Virgin Diet was the first real world test case for me.  The previous times I’ve tried it I’ve either been doing a little trial run or was home-bound.  The real world test proved to be a bit more difficult, especially with no means of just “skipping” it for a moment and then going back to it again.  During each of the diet experiment phases I’m going to try to have zero slip ups.  I am not planning for cheat days, cheat meals or whatever.  A slip up is bound to happen, but those should be accidents not on-purposes.  With that in mind I was able to navigate the landscape but it definitely wasn’t completely carefree or pleasant.

The first day of the elimination diet is now in the record books.  I was never concerned about being able to get through the first day, and there were no real surprised except for the need to really plan ahead for the next week’s food.