Paleo Day 14: Back To Clean Eating

As I said at the end of Day 13, I was going to seriously buckle down and get back to some good whole foods clean eating.  That is exactly what I did and I threw in some exercise (finally!) to boot.

After a bit of a cheat day I buckled down.  This isn’t a crying in your cornflakes sort of buckling down, or a case of me shoveling penance food in my mouth. I simply emphasized the foods I enjoy eating that are very clean and very Paleo.  I started off the morning finishing off the sauteed spinach, kale, arugula and mushroom mixture from last night.  I put them in a frying pan and let them heat up before pouring two scrambled eggs over them.  Since I haven’t been eating breakfast much this past week that proved to be a lot of food to start the day with.

Along with tons of housework the grocery store was next up on my list.  I have been out of all reasonable vegetables for too long, so stocked up on all of those and some eggs.  Grocery shopping is a lot easier when the only aisle you spend any appreciable time in is the produce section.  I never had much draw to the other aisles anyway, but it’s even more exacerbated now.   With my basket full of produce I headed home to make lunch.

Lunch was one of my salads, which I’m now labeling a “Super Salad.”  As I’ve highlighted before these are massive concoctions with as many different variety of plants as I can think to put in them.  Today’s concoction was to use up the last remains of vegetables from last week and then some.  I had some shredded cabbage, celery, a green pepper and some carrots left behind.  To those I added kale, tomatoes portobello mushrooms.  I also split up the rest of the chicken wings from dinner a few nights ago and dressed it with a generous helping of olive oil, red wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar, lemon juice and seasonings.  The ingredients alone were pushing almost two pounds.  That was a bit much for me so I figured maybe I’d eat most at lunch and then the rest later.  Once again however my eating habits of the last week have changed how well my stomach stretches and I didn’t even eat a third of it before I was uncomfortably full.  I put the rest in the fridge for later.

After getting some work done in the afternoon I did my first workout since I had my leg issue.  Twenty minutes on the elliptical went by fine, if not a little slow since it’s one of those “rat on the wheel” devices.  I could feel my muscles initially not wanting to work together but they came out fine in the end.  It’s been just under two weeks so hopefully the loss of cardio and muscle performance I gained from the previous two months isn’t lost.  Another good thing was that my leg problem didn’t resurface at all, so I’ll be trying for a little more tomorrow. When I got home I nibbled on the salad more as I made dinner.

Dinner for both of us was a nice filet from a local farmer.  To that I made a sweet potato for my partner.  For my vegetables I chose to finally cut into this butternut squash I’ve had since late-March, when I was supposed to start this whole thing.  It had started getting a soft spot so I wasn’t sure if it was going to be salvageable.  It actually was pretty isolated, but I still cut off the half of the squash that had it.  The rest tasted fine and broiled up nice.  I forgot to rub it down with olive oil or coconut oil before roasting it in the oven.  It didn’t change the flavor much but it did give it a really poor crust-like consistency on the outside of the flesh.  I wouldn’t be happy if I was serving that to guests but it was fine for me.

As the night wore on I continued to try to nibble through the rest of the salad.  I also ended the evening by eating a bowlful of cherries that I bought at the store earlier.  I figured that while fresh fruit is in season I might as well start enjoying it over the frozen varieties.

With that a full day of housework, some exercising and a return to clean eating was completed.  That was not a bad way to end the second week of Paleo, in my estimation anyway.