Breakfast – scrambled eggs with broccoli, peppers, and mushrooms
Bacon
Cantaloupe
Lunch – Greens to Go
Salad with mixed greens, strawberries, broccoli, olives, mushrooms, avocadoes, walnuts, chicken, and olive oil
Dinner – in my room
Roast beef, coconut butter, and a banana
Lunch – Kent dining Hall. Steamed broccoli and carrots, salad with bacon, chicken, mushrooms, artichokes, peppers, tomato sauce, salsa. I also ate a banana and then in my room I ate coconut butter by the spoonful.
Dinner – Trabant, turkey burger with guacamole, caramelized onions, and tomatoes.
Then I went to the Primal Blueprint Transformation Seminar! They only have these about once a month, and what are the chances that this one happened to be in Newark, let alone Trabant? From 6:30 to 9:30, Mike Dilandro talked about the primal blueprint “laws”, the history of the diet, and action plans. We also got a bunch of primal stuff like books, a t-shirt, a bag, and a poster.
I am going to wear this shirt when I go to the gym, so I can feel better about myself when I can’t even do a pull-up or push-up.
Lunch – From Burger Studio in Trabant, I got a double turkey burger with caramelized onions, raw onions, tomatoes, guacamole, and bacon. And a cup of mangoes from the side fridge.
Dinner – salad from Greens to Go, coconut butter, microwaved banana with carob powder and coconut butter, an avocado
Breakfast – banana
Lunch – Trabant salad from the Greens to Go station. It had mixed greens, olives, strawberries, broccoli, mushrooms, avocados, walnuts, chicken, bacon bits, and olive oil. I decided to change the no nuts rule to no nuts by themselves. But I will still eat nuts in salad or other dishes. When I finished the salad, I was in the mood to eat more bacon. So, I went back to Greens to Go and asked for a side of bacon. I said, “at the cash register, they’ll charge me for extra protein.” They looked kind of confused, but they still gave me bacon in a 2-ounce salad dressing cup. Then, at the cash register, I said that I just got bacon, and I said, “at the salad bar they said you should just charge for extra protein.” Haha. So then, since all the tables in Trabant were then taken, I got to eat bacon bits by the spoonful in the Trabant lounge right next to the sign that said “no food or drinks.”
Snack – coconut butter
DInner – Kent Dining Hall tilapia, cooked spinach, steamed broccoli, pineapple sauce, and artichokes from the salad bar.
Back in the room – microwaved banana with coconut butter and carob powder.
We had a snow day this morning! So Aimee and I decided to make microwave eggs. Basically, we cracked 4 eggs in a bowl, stirred it, and added ghee, and then microwaved it for 3 minutes. We had to take the bowl out occasionally during those 3 minutes in order to stir it, since the microwave cooks the eggs from the outside in, and we didn’t want super over-cooked egg on the outside and raw egg on the inside. When it was done, we split it and added salsa. I also had a clementine, and we split an avocado. Then I remembered reading an article from Mark’s Daily Apple called “Do Perfect Foods Exist?” http://www.marksdailyapple.com/do-perfect-foods-exist/#axzz2tH8p2rhu It’s about how you could find legitimate reasons not to eat every single food, although some foods have a lot more bad than others. We looked up the article, where one of the foods mentioned was eggs. He said that egg whites contain potentially gut-irritating proteins, mostly lysozymes that can exacerbate autoimmune conditions. I have always known that I don’t feel the best after eating eggs – actually, I went through a phase during summer 2012 where I refused to eat eggs because of how they made me feel. That is, until I discovered adding ghee to the eggs, because then they would taste better and I wouldn’t think as much about how they made me feel afterward. But I wonder if I’m just sensitive to whatever is in the egg white. After all, when I eat a hard-boiled egg or over-easy egg, I hate eating the egg white and sometimes just eat the egg yolk. So, then I decided to see how I would feel if I just ate the egg yolk. I cracked an egg into the bowl and then poured the yolk out into the sink, and then just microwaved the egg yolk. I’ll probably need to try it again tomorrow, since my stomach was already feeling kind of icky in a way that I’m probably just used to when I had that egg yolk.
About an hour after breakfast, my friend Lauren called to say that she was about 15 minutes away from my dorm and asked if I wanted to have lunch. So all in all, she made the 25-minute trek through the snow to see me, and I was so happy to see her for the first time in 2 months. We spent about an hour and a half in the Kent Dining Hall, and so it’s a good thing that Kent has continuous dining hours so we weren’t kicked out. I had steamed broccoli and snow peas, and then a salad with broccoli, beets, spinach, peppers, olives, and – surprise! – frozen mango chunks!
When I got back to my dorm, since I only had fruits and vegetables in the dining hall, I ate half a slice of brisket and had a few spoonfuls of coconut butter.
At about 5:45, Aimee and Laura and I were about to go to the Little Bob to work out, but then Laura called the gym and it turns out that they were closed today. So instead, we decided to use Aimee’s car, which she just brought to campus this semester, to go to Pathmark. Laura wanted to buy gluten-free cake mix so she could make a cake for her friend, and Aimee and I wanted to buy bananas. We bought other stuff while we were there, including avocados, macadamia nuts, kiwis, and spaghetti squash.
I had dinner in my room – cod, steamed kale, cooked mini-carrots, string beans, apple sauce, macadamia nuts, and the rest of the mashed cooked carrots.
So, fun fact – I made an account on friendship-bracelets.net, and I created a bunch of patterns using the Generator page. I saw three of my patterns get rejected, but they finally accepted two of them! Here are the links: http://friendship-bracelets.net/pattern.php?id=78382 and http://friendship-bracelets.net/pattern.php?id=78388.
I’m really tired today since I was blogging until 2 am last night, and I STILL didn’t finish because my laptop started freaking out on me. It’s kind of ironic that what’s keeping me from getting a good night’s sleep is blogging about something that’s supposed to make me feel better. So, I’m going to keep today’s post short and just talk about what I ate.
Breakfast – I ate in the dining hall with Aimee, Sachiyo, Laura, Calvin, and Joe. I got an omelette with broccoli, mushrooms, and peppers, bacon, and a cantaloupe slice
Lunch – in my room, I had brisket, coconut butter, macadamia nuts, marinara sauce out of the jar, and a clementine
Then I took a nap, which I really needed after only getting 4 hours of sleep.
DInner – Russell Dining Hall with Aimee. It was Thanksgiving-themed, so there was turkey, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, stuffing (which they call bread dressing), and steamed broccoli. Since they add a bunch of sugar and high fructose corn syrup and the like to the sweet potatoes, the only thing I could eat was the steamed broccoli. They also had steamed carrots and snap peas at the vegetarian station. I also got water chestnuts, spinach, and olive oil from the salad bar.
During dinner, Aimee and I were trying to plan our dessert of mushed microwaved bananas with coconut butter, but unfortunately, the dining hall was all out of bananas. So was the POD (stands for Provisions On Demand, open from 2 pm until 1 am every day) and Perkins. We were very confused since this was two days in a row that we couldn’t find bananas in any dining halls anywhere. So, Aimee, Sachiyo, and I had to settle on microwaving apple chunks instead. Unfortunately, apple chunks and coconut butter don’t really taste that good together.
At some point, I should probably talk about my classes. I’m taking Population Ecology, Spanish, Meteorology, a new class called From Farm to Table, and Symphonic Band. I will also start doing research on honeybee nutrition in a couple weeks. I will probably be talking about my From Farm to Table class pretty often. I’m just too tired now. Although most of that tired is probably from lack of sleep rather than low carb flu.
The good news is that my sugar cravings are getting better. Actually, during dinner, I kept going back for more steamed vegetables and salad, and the thought of eating the sugary sweet potatoes, cranberries, or desserts didn’t really even occur to me.
Monday, February 10 was the first day of class for the spring semester. I went with Laura, Aimee, and Sachiyo to breakfast at 8:00 since I had class at 8:40 and they had classes at 9. I was considering what to get for breakfast, remembering my rule of no meat from the dining halls unless I have no meat in my room. Then I realized that I could have eggs since they aren’t meat. Plus, if you read my post about the first Day 1 of the Whole30, eggs that they sell in a lot of natural food places aren’t even usually better than conventional eggs. Even at Newark Natural Foods, I was very disappointed to see marketing claims on the chicken burgers like, “our chickens are fed a very special formula blend of corn, soy, and wheat!” Um, I have never before seen a carton of eggs that said, “from chickens raised on a diet of bugs and larvae.” If I ever saw that, I would probably find the owner of the store and give him or her a hug. I don’t even care if those soybeans and corn and wheat are organic. I mean, you could eat a diet of organic poison ivy, and it would still be poison ivy. All of that irritation is exactly what is going on the walls of both your and the chicken’s gastrointestinal tract when you eat that stuff. Except you can see and feel the effects of poison ivy on your skin, but you can’t see or feel the effects of the gluten, lectins, and other chemicals from grains and legumes on your GI tract walls. http://www.marksdailyapple.com/lectins/#axzz2t5TU1Q3j and http://www.marksdailyapple.com/how-common-is-gluten-sensitivity/#axzz2t5TkrVTi. There are many other articles too.
So, at the dining hall, there are 4 options for eggs – omelette made from liquid egg whites, omelette made from liquid egg yolks, omelette made from liquid mixed eggs, and scrambled eggs made from eggs that they actually crack right there. I figured that those would probably be the safest bet, and so I got scrambled eggs with two eggs, broccoli, mushrooms, and peppers. And then. I saw. Bacon. Now, I know I had it in my rules that I wasn’t going to eat dining hall meat yada yada yada but I decided right then and there to make an exception for bacon, since they hardly ever have bacon in the UD dining halls, instead opting to serve sausage, or Canadian bacon, or “breakfast ham” depending on the day. So basically my rule is, whenever there is bacon, I will eat it. When I was staying at a kibbutz last summer, every breakfast and dinner (except Shabbat) was a dairy meal. Every morning when we walked to breakfast, I always said, “I wonder what they’re going to have this morning. Maybe bacon?” I thought this was funny every time. Of course, there never was bacon. But now there was bacon! So I had a breakfast of scrambled eggs and vegetables, bacon (!), and a slice of cantaloupe.
For lunch, I didn’t go to the dining hall, but instead I had brisket with Newark Natural Foods marinara sauce (since I couldn’t have ketchup, but that combination really didn’t work so please don’t try it), one and a half avocados, macadamia nuts, and the failed apple sauce that I made the night before.
I’m not really sure what that picture was supposed to add, since you all can probably imagine what sliced apples look like. But I like to look at pictures of food.
For dinner, I went with Laura, Aimee, and Sachiyo to the dining hall. We realized when we got there that we forgot to check the online menu to look at the ingredients in each food item. So, Aimee and I just crossed our fingers and got the tilapia with cooked spinach. The tilapia tasted kind of off, so I only ate about 1/3 of it. (Fun fact, Google Chrome doesn’t recognize the word tilapia, so I just added it to the dictionary. Weird.) When we got back to the dorm, I looked up the ingredients for tilapia and spinach and was very relieved to see that there were no forbidden ingredients in either food. Well, there was plenty of canola and soybean oil in both, but that’s not forbidden according to Whole30. So we were very relieved to know that we wouldn’t have to start the 30 days all over again. Since I hardly ate anything for dinner, I also ate coconut butter, marinara sauce, a banana, and cocoa butter. Yes, I eat marinara sauce out of the jar with a spoon. What do you think I’m going to do with it, put it on pasta? You’re funny. Although sometime I do want to try having a pasta dish using spaghetti squash. One of the Whole30 rules is that you’re not allowed to paleo-fy any desserts, but spaghetti isn’t a dessert and so doing that is perfectly legal.
The Whole30 Daily Email for day 3 talked about low carb flu. Here is more information about low carb flu: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/low-carb-flu/#axzz2t5ZOio9W. I was definitely feeling the low carb flu that day. But I know that there are better things to come, because once I get over the low carb flu, I will become fat-adapted! http://www.marksdailyapple.com/a-metabolic-paradigm-shift-fat-carbs-human-body-metabolism/#axzz2t5ZfhX6S. My favorite quote from that blog post was:
“The basic underlying assumption is that glucose is the preferred fuel of most cells; BUT, because we can’t store very much glucose (as glycogen in liver and muscles), we need to provide a continuous source of glucose in the form of exogenous carbohydrate (high carb meals) to keep the brain, blood, and certain organs humming along and the muscles primed for activity. AND, if we don’t feed ourselves enough carbohydrate every few hours, our blood sugar will drop and we’ll go into “starvation mode” and cannibalize our precious muscle tissue. AND any lack of regular glucose refilling (i.e. skipping a meal or fasting) will cause cortisol to rise, which will have additional deleterious effects. FURTHERMORE, an excess of glucose in the bloodstream is known to raise insulin and will predispose excess calories (from all sources) to be stored as fat. THEREFORE, we should also be doing a lot of moderate-to-heavy cardio or lifting activity most days to burn off this excess stored body fat. HOWEVER, if we want to be ready and able to exercise frequently and strenuously to burn off our stored fat, we need to eat lots of complex carbohydrates between workouts to refill our glycogen stores. And ULTIMATELY, the only way to lose weight is to restrict calories (calories in<calories out), BUT if you’re working out regularly, it’s almost impossible to maintain a calorie-restricted regimen and still be able to work out hard enough to burn appreciable calories. Sheesh.”
That makes me laugh every time.
The morning of Sunday, February 9 was the first day that the UD dining halls were open. I wasn’t planning on eating the dining hall meat, so I had brisket and then coconut butter before I went with Aimee to the dining hall at about 11:30. At the dining hall, I had cooked mixed vegetables, along with a salad of spinach, tomatoes, mushrooms, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. I also had two slices of pineapple and one slice of honeydew. I took two apples (one of which I ate shortly after leaving the dining hall) and an orange from the dining hall to eat for later. We managed to avoid all of the non-paleo brunch foods that we sometimes eat – all of the candied fruit toppings for waffles, and the ice cream bar.
This used to taste good to us, but it actually felt nice to leave brunch without feeling like we needed to take a nap for the next 3 days.
Then, we got back to my room, and I met my new roommate, Laura! She just transferred to UD from SUNY Purchase. The first thing she did was offer me brownies that she had made, so I told her I was gluten-free, which of course doesn’t even cover half of the story of my current dietary restrictions. I didn’t want to tell her about the Whole30 yet because I know how crazy it sounds to someone who isn’t on it or knows nothing about it. I mean, I still remember my reaction for the first week after hearing about the paleo diet for the first time, how crazy I thought it sounded. (She now knows all about the Whole30 and is being very supportive except for when she blatantly eats brownies when I am around just to test my willpower haha.)
My mom was in Newark having lunch with her friend, and then she stopped by my dorm to bring me even more delicious Whole-30-approved food: pears, clementines, eggs, tomatoes, grapes, sliced apples, and canned salmon. She also met Laura and Aimee. While Laura was busy unpacking, Aimee and I took a trip to Newark Natural Foods. From the Newark Natural Foods website newarknaturalfoods.com:
“Newark Natural Foods Co-op is a natural and organic food store located on Main Street in Newark, Delaware. As a Co-op, Newark Natural Foods makes business decisions based on sustainability and the impact we have on our earth and our community.
Our 6,000 square foot grocery store carries organic fruits and vegetables, grains, bulk foods and a large selection of grocery staples. We offer free-range, hormone and antibiotic free meats, eggs and dairy products, along with a wide selection of Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Vegetarian and Vegan alternatives. With a large vitamin and supplement section and knowledgeable staff, you can receive personalized customer service when choosing a vitamin or supplement. We also carry a large selection of natural and cruelty-free beauty care products, books and environmentally friendly household items. Come visit us…we’re open to the public!
Sign-up for our E-Newsletter!”
No, they didn’t pay me to advertise for them. Just like Mark Sisson doesn’t pay me to tell everyone about the paleo diet and marksdailyapple.com, and Devacurl doesn’t pay me to tell everyone about their products and how they changed my life/hair forever. I just get obsessed with things. Like Chipotle. And friendship-bracelets.net. And coconuts. And bacon. And the steel drum app on my phone that lets me make music 24/7. Anyway.
My friend from Down to Earth introduced me to Newark Natural Foods a couple months ago, and now Aimee and I usually go every Sunday. It’s like our tradition, we eat dining hall brunch (usually), work out at the gym, go to Chipotle for lunch (if we didn’t have brunch), sometimes go to Sweet and Sassy Cupcakes to get icing “shots” (which are totally not paleo but they are only $0.75 each, and they are still more paleo than having the whole cupcake), and then go to Newark Natural Foods. My favorite thing to get there used to be the coconut milk ice cream (made with a coconut base instead of a dairy base). We would also get coconut butter, maple sugar candies, chocolate, sometimes honey sticks, and sometimes paleo fudge. This is all paleo-approved, since there are no grains or dairy, but none of it is Whole30 approved since there is added sugar in everything (except the coconut butter). So, I went, wondering what I was going to buy if I couldn’t buy all of the stuff that I usually buy there. Fortunately, we discovered the produce section. I bought 3 avocados, no-sugar-added marinara sauce, coconut butter, cocoa butter, and pre-cooked roast beef. We also saw a stand of pineapples and whole coconuts! We considered buying the coconut, but then I remembered one time last year that I bought a coconut at Whole Foods and I brought it back to my room and realized I had no idea how to open it. I hacked away at it with my knife, and I still could only manage to get a tiny bit of the coconut meat out. But one day, I will buy a whole coconut and learn how to open it.
Here is the whole chocolate display that we had to walk by and not buy anything on the way to the cash register:
Ugh, just 28 more days and we can have all the dark chocolate that we want!
We trudged through the 20-minute walk back from Newark Natural Foods through enough snow that would have been torrential rain if it was a bit warmer. Then, we got dinner with Laura and Aimee’s roommate, Sachiyo. I ate vegetables and Brussels sprouts in the dining hall.
Then we took Laura on a tour of campus, through the snow. We made it all the way up to North Campus and then we took the bus back. The evening bus route went a long way before it reached Perkins, and it included a stop near the UDairy creamery. Aimee and I were trying to figure out the three possible outcomes of this diet. Either we would stop in the middle (which is unlikely since I am blogging about this, and we paid $14.95 each for the Whole30 daily emails), we would finish and feel so great that we wouldn’t want to eat anything non-Paleo ever again, or we would finish and say “THANK GOD, I HAVE MISSED YOU, UDAIRY!” In the case of the third option, we will reward ourselves to a trip to the UDairy Creamery.
When we got back to my room, we hung out and I helped Aimee get started on a friendship bracelet while Laura made some crafty things for her side of the room. Meanwhile, I ate a bunch of food from my room – brisket, mashed sweet potatoes, carrots, macadamia nuts, cocoa butter, and marinara sauce. Cocoa butter, as it turns out, is just pure fat, unlike coconut butter which is the whole coconut ground up, and it would probably be more palatable if I had added it in something, but I just ate some of it straight out of the package. And yes, I ate marinara sauce by the spoonful. Aimee, Sachiyo, and Laura made fun of me for it, and I was just like, What are you going to do about it? I think I just ate food all the way until the clock on Laura’s laptop said 9:00 and then she told me I had to stop or else I had to start the 30 days all over again.
After Aimee and Sachiyo left, I was hanging out with Laura and I decided to make apple sauce the way I’ve done before. I cut the apples into very small chunks, put them in a bowl and added water, and then microwaved it. I don’t think I microwaved it for long enough, because the apple chunks weren’t soft enough to mush into apple sauce. But they still were warm, soft, and delicious, like apple pie. I poured the liquid out into a cup and drank it, and it tasted like warm apple cider. Laura said, “Wow, you’re really at one with your food.” It was well after 9 pm at that point, so I put the apple chunks into a Tupperware container and put it in the fridge to eat the next day.
Stay tuned for today’s post! Spoiler alert, I successfully completed day 3, so tomorrow I will be on day 4, the farthest I’ve ever been! Meanwhile Aimee is miles and miles ahead of me.
Sorry I haven’t posted earlier, I’ve been busy with the whole moving back into UD and starting the second semester. I will post about day 1, and then I will post about the other days later.
Two days ago (February 8), I had my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and ghee. Then I went to the indoor pool with my mom and we treaded water, since my mom hurt her hip. For lunch, I had catfish, kale, cooked carrots, and a whole sweet potato. As a snack, I had a pear and an orange. For dinner, I had brisket that my mom made, bruschetta (everyone else put it on their bread but I just ate it by the spoonful), roasted broccoli, and mashed carrots. When everyone else had brownies and/or Rice Krispy treats for dessert, I ate a couple spoonfuls of coconut butter instead.
I had to figure out what to bring with me to UD, since I was going to avoid so much of the dining hall food. I ended up bringing 4 cans of Trader Joe’s coconut cream, a jar of coconut butter, two jars of Trader Joe’s ghee, tea, frozen chicken, and food that my mom made in the hope of lasting a long time: brisket, mashed sweet potatoes, and mashed carrots.
Then I got back to UD and saw Aimee for the first time in two months! She was on day 5 of Whole30 when I was still on day 1, because she originally signed up before midnight on February 3, and I signed up at around 1 am on February 4. Plus, I had to start over, and I clicked the start over button slightly after midnight, so that delayed me even more. We went to a birthday party and then I crashed in her room.
So, at the end of every Whole30 email, it says:
Every day, we ask you, “How did you do?” If you ate clean, congratulations! If you didn’t, we start the 30 days over again tomorrow.
At the end of your day, select one of the links below:
Unfortunately, today I had to click the second one. I started off really well, with my breakfast of eggs cooked in ghee (no salsa this time!). As a snack, I ate a pear and two spoonfuls of coconut cream.
Then, for lunch, my mom and I went to a restaurant called Harvest, which serves food from local farms, and the menu changes seasonally. I was very careful about what to order, and I decided on the short ribs item. This also had pearl onions, root vegetables, potatoes. and jus. As a diligent new Whole30-er, I asked if the jus had gluten in it, and when the waitress said yes I asked them to serve the food without the jus. I also asked for sweet potatoes instead of potatoes. But then it didn’t occur to me that the root vegetables would have potatoes in them. Not very many – there were also carrots and mushrooms – but I still had potatoes, which are not Whole30-approved. For a while, I was considering changing the rules to add potatoes, but only in whole form – no french fries or foods with potato starch in them. Then I remembered that I wasn’t going to do this half-way – go hard or go home! I figured that I was only on day 2, and I could afford to just start over so that I wouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics to justify this. But I also figured that out of all the things to accidentally eat, a tiny bit of potato was probably one of the least harmful things I could have eaten.
Despite the accidental potato consumption, I thoroughly enjoyed my meal. The ribs were so tender, and the vegetables tasted so fresh in a way that I had not experienced at a restaurant in a long time. I took my time eating and enjoyed every bite. I also enjoyed spending time with my mom, since I will be leaving for college in two days.
When I got home, I made my banana-coconut cream dish, and I added carob powder. Then I ate macadamia nuts and coconut butter. Coconut butter is ground up whole coconut. I got this Artisana brand coconut butter almost two months ago from Newark Natural Foods, You can also order it from amazon.com, or you can make your own coconut butter by blending coconut flakes in a high-power blender for 20 minutes, which I did once. Coconut butter is so good that when I eat it, I am convinced that this food is too good to be true. I have introduced coconut butter to Aimee and another one of my friends, and both of them had the same amazed reaction after trying their first spoonful. Coconut butter can be used in fudge, baked goods, melted as a topping on fruit, or you can do what my friends and I do and just eat it straight from the jar. I don’t worry about portion control – since it is so high in fat and low in sugar, my body just knows when to stop eating. The best part is that it doesn’t require refrigeration, so I can bring it with me anywhere to eat as a snack.
Then I figured, well, I already ate potatoes, so I might as well cheat for the rest of the day. So I had some delicious chocolate fudge that my sister had made the previous week, but then I didn’t really feel the need to cheat anymore just because I could. I guess even in that day and a half, my body realized how good it felt to only eat clean foods.
For dinner, I had a chicken burger that I had made last night, steamed kale, and a sweet potato with ghee. Unfortunately I didn’t exercise today, but I will tomorrow.
So, I just opened the Whole30 email and clicked on the link that says to start the challenge over, and unfortunately I did this after midnight, so tomorrow will be day 0 and I will have to wait until Saturday for it to be day 1…oh well, I will still treat tomorrow as day 1 and I will just have a 31-day challenge. Because if 30 days of eating good-quality foods is supposed to be really good for you, then 31 days will just be even better.
Paleo Blue Hen 