I've been having some fast-food cravings the past couple days. Not McDonalds -- I'm not that depraved -- but convenience has been calling louder than usual. Two days in a row I was out long after lunchtime, driving around hungry, and it took some self-discipline not to stop along the way and pick something up. I lasted until I got home by thinking about how I'm almost to the halfway point, and I'm perfectly capable of surviving feeling hungry for a few more minutes.
The cool thing is that I haven't used rice yet! I was also wanting pasta last night; it would have been really good with the sauce I made for dinner. But I wanted to go one more day -- a full half month -- without resorting to imported grains.
There have definitely been nutritional changes to my diet as a result of this challenge, not least of which is that I am, for the first time in my life, eating 100% whole grains, with no refined flour (or sugar) at all. So okay, the first few days we still had some Greenstar GF bread to use up, and there was Sophia's birthday party, and I have been indulging in a bite of chocolate here and there (up to a maximum of 10 grams chocolate, which contains 3 grams sugar, per day.) But compared to the universal presence of refined carbs in every processed food on the market, that's a pretty significant shift. Even though I use mostly whole grains and sugars in my home cooking, refined carbs still leak in every time I succumb to convenience, which under normal circumstances is a lot. (I generally consider packaged crackers and boxed cereals to fall in the "refined" category even when they're made from whole grains, because the high-heat crisping and puffing and flaking they go through destroys most of the nutrients.)
I think we may also be eating fewer grains overall, since turning them into food requires extra work that I don't necessarily have extra time for. The place I notice this most is that I'm not routinely adding toast & butter to my plate when I make eggs (which is one of my quick-fix foods when I'm feeling rushed.)
And, speaking of eating less of, the other big nutrititional shift I've noticed is what I eat when I snack. On my normal diet, "snack" most often means "nuts" or "processed grains," since those are often the most convenient foods available. Now, the most convenient foods are either fruits & veggies or leftover home-baked biscuits, waffles, etc.
There appear to be fewer calories in this diet, and there are most certainly fewer fat calories. And I think I'm losing weight, though it's not dramatic enough to brag about. 'Course, I've always been suspicious of those "lose 10 pounds in one week" (and gain them back in the next) diets anyway. The best weight-loss diet, in my opinion, is one you don't notice you're on until your clothes get looser. Which this one might just qualify for.
breakfast: waffles with raspberries (same as yesterday)
school lunch: chili (leftover), sweet peppers (garden) and cucumber slices (a friend's garden), peach (Black Diamond) and raspberries (garden)
my lunch: leftover waffles, grits (Cayuga Pure) and refritos (leftover) with sweet pepper (garden) and lettuce (Blue Heron), red plum (Black Diamond)
dinner: chicken sausage (Bilinski's) au jardinera (with the garden -- summer squash, onion, red pepper, in tomato sauce with marjoram, tarragon, thai basil, garlic, and a sprinkling of parsley on top)
evening: hot grape juice (mix of wild, arbor, and Thornbush Farms grapes) with cider (Littletree) and honey
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