T-2 Days to Elimination Diet: Cleaning Out the House!

With only two days left to go I decided to finish up cleaning out the house.  I hate wasting food, which means I’m a really good left-overs saver.  I know lots of people can’t stand the idea of putting food they made away in the freezer to be thawed out, reheated and eaten later. Sure, it’s not as good as the day you bought it.  Consider though that most of the prepared food you buy and reheat from the grocery store went through the exact same process, it just did it on an industrial scale and with god knows what (along with excess salt and sugar) added to it.  Since several of the foods in the house were going to be verboten for the better part of a year, I started eating my way through them.  I was able to do it in a mostly responsible way.

The day actually started off with a healthy dose of shoveling.  We got a few inches of snow last night, which means fresh out of bed I had a good hour or so of shoveling and salting.  Since I’m ramping back up into working out and that burned a good 350 calories (according to my Garmin watch with heart rate monitor) I decided that counted for the gym and so I set out to get the rest of my day’s duties done.  Breakfast was some pastured grass fed pork bacon with some more of the savory waffles my friend made.  I didn’t want them to go to waste, especially with how delicious they tasted.  Unfortunately I didn’t have the egg to make a complete breakfast so it was more two thirds of one, which was sufficient.  Lunch was a heaping salad of kale and other greens mixed with carrots, onions, salmon, olive oil, vinegar and miscellaneous seasonings.  Throughout the day I was snacking on some lighter things, like carrots and mango, and some heavier things, like some chocolate covered coconut chunks and graham crackers.  Dinner was some mushroom risotto that has been occupying my freezer for some time.  It wasn’t going to last another year, not by a long shot.  The last bit of gingerbread dough wasn’t going to either, so that got whipped up and baked too.

The net of the day is that even though I exceeded my calorie burn by just under 300 calories, I didn’t hit lots of the micronutrient levels because a lot of this excess food that would go to waste is simply not nutrient dense.  With tomorrow being the last day before starting the elimination diet, I don’t have much time to finish polishing off a lot of this stuff.  I’ll do what I can, but come Sunday morning the experiment starts and things get locked in.