Paleo Day 28: A New Shake Recipe And Lots of Restaurant Foods

I started getting into the real estate search business recently.  I like my house but in the quest to look at the reasonableness of doing an upgrade to the house I ended up looking for a new one.  If you have ever done a house search you know that entails lots of time in a car.  This was no exception.

I knew that we would be going several hours, maybe until mid afternoon, driving around looking at places so I made sure to fill up on something that would really keep me going: a health shake.  Rather than my usual JJ Virgin shake I decided to try something new.  Awhile ago I stated I wanted to go with a more whole foods version of the shake.  The typical Virgin Diet Shake has: pea protein powder, coconut/almond milk, chia seeds, almond butter and mixed berries.  I wanted to try to get back to whole ingredients as much as possible.  The pea protein powder was sufficient for my needs so that ingredient stayed.  Rather than the milk and almond butter I decided to use raw almonds and kale combined with water.  I pureed that before adding any other ingredients.  I then added the chia seeds and mixed berries.  The resulting shake has a much more vibrant taste, probably from the kale.  It also seems to lack some of the tackiness that I always thought was coming from the chia seeds but that I now think may have been coming from the almond butter or the various gums they use to hold together the almond and coconut milks.

We actually did end up driving around until 2pm so a late lunch was in order.  Rather than cooking something in we ended up eating a light lunch out.  I had a steak salad, with lots of beets and mixed greens.  I originally intended to run shortly thereafter so I wanted to make sure that I didn’t have too full a stomach.  Unfortunately when I got home I crashed hard.  Rather than taking a nice long run I took in some apparently much needed shuteye.  When I awoke I barely had enough time to get a run in before meeting friends for dinner, but instead we ended up having to do another appointment to look at a house.  So, it turns out the day was another exercise bust.  Tomorrow perhaps?

Dinner was a pretty hefty meal.  I just have had problems getting enough calories in the last few days and my body was definitely reflecting that.  I ended up getting a decent sized piece of salmon with a side of asparagus plus a heaping pile of mashed potatoes at Houlihan’s.  That apparently triggered me into Cookie Monster mode because I ate all of the left over fries, a good 1.5 cups of them, that were on the table.  That was a definitely non-paleo addition to the meal, but I was pretty famished.

I had had a couple of glasses of wine at dinner but the rest of the night was going to be alcohol free.  I opened up one of those bottles of Fre alcohol free sparkling wines and sipped that for the rest of the evening, a half bottle’s worth or so.

The evening ended late, for me anyway, around midnight.  I was quickly crashing after the pretty exhausting day.