My significant other tells me that she prefers posts that say how it is, how I feel, more than the posts which are designed to share things I have learned, things I have found online. Hmmm. Well, as I read back through the days worth of pages it does seem that I have begun to do the lazy man’s blog method of generating content, but, darn it, that stuff is all so interesting to me.

This lifestyle change is really starting to take hold now. I automatically get up and throw my little non stick frying pan on the stove to warm up, getting it ready to warm up a couple of eggs. I throw a piece of fruit into my lunch sack without having to think about it. Dinner is always planned with the thought of how well it will carry into the next day’s lunch sack.

I wake up hungry. That is a good thing. That is something I never used to do, and I don’t think it’s because I am not eating enough food, I think it has more to do with my body now planning it’s energy day, and letting me know that I shouldn’t forget breakfast. Even a small breakfast gets me all the way until noon before I get hungry again, unless I starved myself a little bit the day before. If that happened then I am hungry after breakfast and all the way to lunch, lunch wont fill satisfy that hunger and I am slightly hungry all the way to dinner. That is the experience that I had until I got my food journal program, and discovered that I wasn’t getting enough calories into me to take care of my basic needs. If you don’t get enough, then your body chemistry shifts over to other places to find the energy your heart and brain need, it causes discomfort in other ways besides just hunger. I could post a link here, but…

Now that we are not on our detox diet any more we can once again eat starches and sugars. So far I have had potatoes and some corn tortillas with several meals. I know that if you add those things into your meal, it is a whole lot easier to eat enough calories to not be in starvation mode. I read in an 1896 cookbook, which I will not link to here, that a person should eat 20% of their food by weight in starches. Calorie-wise, that would add a bunch of calories to the day. I don’t think that I have even once ate 20% of my food in the form of starches since the 21st. I think that the mix I am having is just about right, right now. I love the texture and flavor of the starches, potato, corn, hominy and the rest. No need to go crazy eating them up. Still mostly vegetables in my meals.  According to the old cookbook, the active adult should eat four and a half ounces of meat per day. That’s right, the equivalent of the patty on a quarter-pounder. One a day. I saw once, on a show where a family lived for six months in a museum in England as though it were 1900 that instead of meats people mostly got their proteins through eating eggs.  Makes sense then that you could just eat 4 ounces a day.

Yesterday we had dinner at Red Robin. The salad that I got was actually listed by name in MyFitnessPal. That was handy. I ate about half of this salad, and all of the chicken breast that was in it. According to my calorie source the entire salad only had 379 calories. I literally could not eat the whole thing, it was pretty big. If you were to try and eat mostly vegetables in your diet, there is just no physical way you could be overweight or get too much to eat in a day. I was packing it in and just ran out of room. I told the wife that I thought maybe my stomach had shrunk some, because I couldn’t get it all in there. Maybe I got 325 calories into me out of that 379. I could have easily added 50% more calories to this meal if I had eaten crackers with it. My daily calorie minimum is 1200 and if I had eaten crackers with my salad it would have consumed almost half of my daily food budget. Amazing to me.

As usual, I will close with a recommendation that you look to the top menu of this Blog and take the survey and fill in the contact form, so that we can invite you to the meetings we are going to start having. The first meeting will be a screening of episode one of “Weight of the Nation”, and a little bit of organization, if there are enough of us there to do that kind of thing.

UPDATE:  My Calorie counting program led me astray.  I actually ate a salad that was 950 calories, instead of 379.  I only ate about 3/4 of it so I didn’t exceed my calorie budget for the day by much.  The salad I picked in MyFitnessPal was the right salad, but it had been modified and a lot of the higher carb things in it were left out (obviously).  Also, I still stand by the notion that eating crackers with it would have made it even more ‘energetic’ of a salad.