Gorge before the storm

I’ve been off all Virgin diet detoxes for a couple of weeks now.  Did I take those two weeks to practice up on eating Paleo, as I will be for the next few months?  No.  Did I power through the Virgin diet to keep myself “pure” going into my tests before the Paleo diet?  No.  Did I decide to treat the two weeks as one grand “last meal” like some death row inmate rolling up to his execution?  No.  In hindsight however that is exactly what it felt like though.

If you made a list of the things I’m not going to be eating for the next several months to years then you probably would have a pretty good list of what I have been consuming the last two weeks.  Processed foods were my friends, especially store bought cookies and sweets.  Coke Zero made a tremendous comeback as well, even though I spent most of the end of last year avoiding it.  I didn’t gorge like I did over the holidays in December.  My calorie count per day is mostly in check, but I was definitely eating a lot of garbage.

That fact showed pretty starkly too in my weight.  While throughout the past few weeks I have been eating slightly more than I’ve been burning, the level of weight increase on the scale has been far greater.  While my weight increased by seven pounds I know for a fact, even if I account for vast errors in my accounting, that I didn’t consume 25,000 in excess calories.  I did average 100-200 calories a day in excess, but that adds up to one to two pounds, not seven.  A lot of that is coming from my recently discovered fact that my body composition does change rather dramatically when eating certain foods.  I have yet to figure out why that is, but it’s pretty clear what the effect is.

Through the weekend I’m going to be starting to plan for the launch of the Paleo diet on April 1st.  I’m hoping to find some delicious new recipes to try and share here.  I’m also hoping I can quickly settle into an easy routine that allows me to plan for the eating style without it being overly repetitive, although I’m usually not one that needs a ton of variety to stay happy about it.