Paleo Day 24: Making good on promise to eat lots of vegetables

Tuesday, June 24, 2014–I said to myself I really wanted to make up for my lost weekend of technically Paleo eating, but not really so great with that due to travel, by amping up the vegetable consumption.  Boy did I ever.  I also started ramping up the working out too.

Today was another day that began at the butt crack of dawn.  Unfortunately what I thought was a fully charged FitBit that was going to act as my alarm clock failed, thus making my partner’s “backup alarm” our actual alarm.  I found myself dragging so I made a cup of regular tea to go with my Virgin Diet Shake for breakfast.  After that we headed out to do some electioneering at a polling station for our county’s primary elections.

By mid-morning I was at work but not especially hungry.  While the campaign we were working provided lots of snack bars, none of them fit my diet so I was running strictly on my breakfast shake.  I ended up eating lunch a little later but had a moderately sized salad, by normal people’s standards, to go with some ahi tuna.  That was going to have to be enough to get me through the workout I was doing mid-afternoon.

I’m glad to now be back to fully working out again. It’s a shame I had to stop just a few weeks into my weight training.  Some muscle groups, like my chest and triceps, actually seemed a bit stronger than when I left.  Others, specifically my shoulders, are stuck where they were in the beginning.  It is ego crushing to be lifting a fraction of the weight of everyone else, but I just have to remind myself that I am the only one who actually cares about that in any way.  Besides if I don’t power through the bashfulness, or maybe envy, then I will never change it.

Upon getting home I made a massive salad of kale, dandelion, carrots, tomato and sardines.  This was technically a mid-day snack but it was an enormous one.  This sort of mid-day snack may become a more regular thing as I try to bump up my Calcium levels (I have a piece specifically about that coming up).  Once I was done eating and washed up it was back to the polling site for a long night of electioneering and vote tallying.

Once all that was done it was well past 9:30.  All that eating hadn’t really gotten me very far in the calorie department, even though my vitamin and mineral intake was through the roof.  I therefore ordered some sauteed chicken and vegetables from the local Chinese restaurant.  This has a white sauce so I was clearly avoiding the soy and gluten.  I was pretty starving for some carbs and even with all of that chicken and broccoli I needed more so I used the full cup of white rice that the Chinese food came with.  I thought that would be enough but I was still very hungry after that so I cut open a baby watermelon and ate half of it.

I can tell that my body is revolting against the weights and working out.  Three weeks of dormancy has it forgetting how things are supposed to be.  I fully expect to have some delayed onset muscle soreness tomorrow for sure.  Unfortunately I have a four mile run to do too.  Trudging on I suppose…