The second week of my diet challenge is now behind me.  I’ve really settled into a good tempo on the diet, even managing eating out rather well.  While I’ve made some improvements on the other goals I still have a way to go.

I’m trying to decide if what happened to me the other day is a case of water intoxication or sodium withdraw…

The first week of my nutritarian diet challenge is now in the books.  I’ve had some good food experiments, I’ve made some progress on my body composition, and I’ve survived some of the challenges.  I’ve also stumbled a bit, but that’s I guess why I called it a challenge in the first place.  So, how did I do with each of my goals?

While on the surface eating the nutritarian way sounds like mostly salads, raw veggies, and fruits, there is actually a lot of potential variety in meals.  I’m a huge salad person, but even I would grow tired of that.  Luckily I’m also a big soup/stew person, and the Eat To Live book has several of those recipes.  The one that I decided to try first, since it jumped right out at me was the Black Forest Cream of Mushroom Soup,which can also be found at Furhman’s website here.

Like a good New Year’s Resolution, the purpose of the challenge is to set a pre-defined short term objective that I can concentrate on and focus for making longer term changes.

What to do?  What to do?  Either as a mechanism of procrastination, or as a legitimate mechanism of study, I’ve really not been doing well the second quarter of the year.  After tightening up my diet and getting some exercise going in the first quarter, with good results to show, the second quarter was more slacking off.  It culminated in a long vacation on a cruise which meant gobbling up tons of junky (but tasty) food, beer, and wine.  Even though we were walking 6-8 miles a day it wasn’t enough to ward off fat gain.  Tomorrow is my first day legitimately back home to actually try and get squared away in this third quarter.  How will I go about doing that?

I could of have been running the past several months, nothing actually stopped me from doing it.  Allergies and pollen levels certainly prevented me from running outside, but that’s not the same as avoiding running at all.  Regardless of the reason, the fact is that today was my first day running in.

Pizza is one of my go to meals to make when people come over.  Everyone likes it, depending on the toppings, I can accommodate a lot of different diets (especially with some of the paleo crust recipes that are out there).  I have my bread machine recipe for making pizza dough. And I’ve been told that people like my pizza.  All told, I could whip up a batch of my traditional pizza dough and have a pizza out of the oven in about an hour–that’s from nothing but flour, water, oil, and toppings to a ready to slice pizza.  A friend sent me this video, on how to make it in a frying pan in twenty minutes, so I figured why not give that a shot to cut the time by a third.  So, how did it go?

Wow!  I thought I liked to eat.  I knew that trying to eat ten pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables in a day was going to be daunting.  I got most of the way there, but enough was enough!

I’m really craving fruits and vegetables.  Whether it’s the fact I haven’t been eating or exercising right as much as I’d like to (which begs the question of why I don’t just do it, but don’t bother me about that) or just the seasonal explosion of fruits and vegetables, it’s just something that I’m craving.  Think of how most people, including me, crave a piece of cake when they go to a nice a nice restaurant.  That’s how much I’ve been craving to just sit down with a watermelon and go to town (yes a whole watermelon), or a big bowl of berries.  Juxtapose that with a serendipitous exposure to some stories and podcasts on the 80/10/10 diet and I’ve decided to give it a shot for one day…tomorrow.