Updates since I last wrote something

Someday this blog may again become something other than “updates since I last wrote something,” but don’t hold your breath. I’m writing this on New Year’s Eve Day, but I certainly don’t have any plans to make blogging a resolution, or even to blog about the resolution I am making. I’ve had such a tendency to overcomplicate everything—not complaining; that’s my idea of fun—but I want to try not doing it for once and see what happens.

Anyway, I was reading over my last few posts, many of which were a long time ago and all about how swamped I had been with work but how it was all going to get better at any moment, probably. That did not happen in 2018 until approximately December 20. (It was a lucrative year, at least.) We also took a couple of fun trips, got Mik accepted to college, and got M.H.’s fifth book out. So it was a good year in a personal sense. And, frankly, the apparent progress on the Mueller investigation has given me enough hope that lately I’ve been sleeping better and have been able to take a break from spending basically all my spare time angry at everyone and everything.

If that trend continues, who knows? I may go back to regularly blogging frivolous nonsense for my own amusement.

A keto plan

We’re back from several weeks of on-and-off travel and more or less staying put for the foreseeable future. I was not too happy with my last experiment in going keto, so I’ve been listening to many, many podcast episodes about the topic. It seems each podcast host has her own program that you can purchase to help you. I don’t really object to supporting these people who provide me tons of free information, but in the end—and coming as no surprise to anyone—I decided it would be more fun for me to develop my own plan. (You’re not the boss of me, keto expert!)

My understanding is that it’s important for women to go into keto gradually and without fasting or eating too little. So my general plan is to 1) start eating breakfast again and 2) eat more carbs for a couple of weeks (for me that’s like a sweet potato and two pieces of fruit a day, plus the usual vegetables and nuts). Then I’ll start tapering off the fruit and starches and increasing fat over a period of six weeks or so. That gets me well into fall, and I think I’ll try to stay keto most of the winter, which seems to me a super-logical form of seasonal eating.

There are several other aspects of this New Life Plan, too, in the back of my mind, but I’m making a conscious effort to keep this simple, which I will attempt to reinforce by not writing about them right now.

Low-carb purgatory

For quite a while M.H. and I have been “carb cycling” by eating them only on Friday nights, but some new reading on the topic recently suggested to me that that was maybe not the best pattern. Of course M.H. was doing fine on that diet, just like he does fine on every new thing I suggest, but he’s super-cooperative in going along with all my experiments. So together we decided to try instead spending six straight weeks eating low-carb and hopefully get into a ketogenic state, leading up to a family wedding we attended last Saturday.

Being keto is supposed to make you feel amazing, and M.H. pretty much did feel amazing. I didn’t feel bad, but I didn’t feel great, either, and as you may remember I was having a hard time swimming and walking in the morning. So, anyway, the six weeks were over as of our car trip to the wedding, where we ate essentially whatever we wanted, including wedding tacos and wedding ice cream.

I thought I would feel awful the morning after returning home, and I wasn’t really planning to swim. But it turned out that I was awake at 5:10 a.m. and feeling fine, and so I went. And the swimming went great, and the walk home was easy, and I felt fine and not at all exhausted the rest of the day. BECAUSE OF THE STUPID CARBS.

My working theory is that I was essentially doing it wrong (because of COURSE it’s trickier for women than for men) and not actually in ketosis at all but merely in “low-carb purgatory.”

Sorry if I sound like I’m talking gibberish, but I just wanted to vent, and if you care you can Google all these terms.

Important updates

1. I finally finished the final edit of M.H.’s new book, turned it into an ebook, and UPLOADED that baby onto Amazon. We decided to do a 99-cent promotion to get it into as many hands as possible, so you can preorder it now for that low, low, very special, limited-time price right here: https://amzn.to/2KZrPVn.
2. It came as a shock to me, as I think I’ve mentioned before, how hard it was to get back into swimming (and walking, even), but I think I’ve got the hang of it at last. At any rate the cotton candy in my arms seems to have been replaced by something more effective at swimming. There are only a couple of weeks left in the team’s outdoor season, but I guess I can still go to the pool on my own, pay money, and swim if I want. I won’t, but if nothing else I need to at least continue walking in the mornings.
3. I’ve rediscovered the wonders of infused water, and in particular the wonders of infusing it with lemon and strawberry slices. My adapted-to-low-sugar palate feels that this is basically a more refreshing version of strawberry lemonade.
4. Finally, it is a new month, but I don’t see the point of declaring that I’m working on a new habit when there are at least four perfectly good other habits from previous months that I have failed to incorporate into my life in any way. Some of them are very simple (“Start each day at the standing desk” literally requires only that I log into my computer from there) so I think I’ll just focus on actually doing the things I already said I wanted to do.

A hike, a kid, a harsh realization

We headed to Bozeman on Friday to watch a Shakespeare in the Park play—but since it’s mountainous, and since Dex lives there, we also planned to take a short hike and to see our boy.

First was the hike (Middle Cottonwood Creek Trail), and not to be obnoxious, but it was not that exciting by Montana standards. Still, if you lived in Bozeman and had this right in your backyard? That would be neat.

Then we picked up Dex, said hello to his cat and one of his buddies, and had a tasty dinner. It is always fun to catch up with Dex, as he loves his job/classes/town/house/cat/friends/life, and honestly what more can you hope for as a parent? 

Unfortunately, at 30 minutes to Shakespeare showtime it was pouring down rain. The good people of Bozeman were heading over there anyway with umbrellas, but we had two raincoats between the three of us and no desire for two hours of wet shivering. So we dropped Dex off and headed home. We’ll have to catch the play at some other venue if we can work it out.

I woke up the next day in PAIN from the short hike—I’m afraid that spending December through May sitting at my desk 10 hours a day has dragged me to new depths of out-of-shape-ness. Seriously, both this and pain from the first two weeks of swimming were no joke; I must be a mess physically. I’m going to need to think hard about what I’m doing for exercise these days and probably step it up a bit.

Still swimming!

Outdoor 6 a.m. swimming got off to a ROUGH start, honestly; all I’ve wanted to do for the couple of weeks is go lie down. Like, no matter what time it was or what I was doing. It was so bad that I was delighted on Monday to have a dental cleaning—30 minutes of scheduled midday horizontal passivity, hooray! Not to mention my neck got horribly sore for some reason that must be related to either really weak muscles or really bad form. But the exhaustion and the neck pain are both lifting, and swimming feels a bit more normal, and the walk home is no longer finishing me off completely.

Plus, now that the water temperature at the pool is reliably good, the morning exercise and sunshine are really nice. It seems the last remaining problem is that I am tragically slow and can’t do even a full 50 meters of butterfly, but that can hardly be considered a problem, since I don’t really have any goals for this other than morning exercise and sunshine.

June habit

Since I am on a minor blogging streak, I’ll do the habit report. (I am still trying to add a new good habit, or eliminate a bad one, every month.) Here’s what I have so far:

January: Eat more vegetables
February: Take shorter, cooler showers
March: Start every workday at the standing desk
April: Something something gratitude
May: Keep social media out of my office and out of my face

The only one of these I’m doing well on is “Eat more vegetables,” but at least I’m doing better than before on all the rest. (It’s good to look at this list in its entirety now and then!)

So for June…I recently had the thought that if I just did one small house-cleaning task every single day, it wouldn’t take any significant time (and might actually make a nice break from desk work), but I could actually get a lot done over time. I started doing that a few weeks ago, but I think I’ll call it my June habit. Every time I notice some small thing that needs to be taken care of, I put it on my calendar for the next available day. (And the things on my list all take about five minutes or less—so not “clean downstairs bathroom,” for example, but “clean downstairs toilet.”) This seems to work really well for me, or at least I’ve done every single thing on my calendar so far and made the house noticeably more pleasant to live in.

Morning swim practice

I went with Mik to the first outdoor morning swim practice of the season, having again scored permission to invade the masters’ side of the pool without actually paying or signing up—one of many perks of being Mik’s mom. (Today we had three 50-meter lanes and two swimmers, so don’t think anyone will mind.) It was a mixed bag…

The good things:

• The pool heater is fixed, and the water temperature was pleasant.
• The horrifyingly nasty locker rooms have been demolished and are being replaced with shiny new ones, which means I’ll be able to take an actual shower after swimming when they fully open in few days.
• The walk home gave me time to listen to an entire hourlong podcast, which I had been missing more than I realized.
• My shoulder is 100 percent again, so I’ve decided to commit to doing around 30 minutes of whatever the actual workout is, rather than just dinking around.

The bad things:

• I slept poorly because I knew the alarm was going off at 4:55. (I’m sure that will pass, and anyway it’s moving to 5:05 tomorrow.)
• Swimming hurts SO MUCH. Not in an “injury” way, more in a “you’re 47 and have not swum in 10 months” way.
• Even walking hurt—in a “you aggravated your Achilles tendon a bit last week while running and it’s not going to let you off the hook just yet” way.

The best thing, really:

• I came home happy (though in pain, truly), and when Mik came home a bit later, it was that much easier to talk to him for having spent 45 minutes in his world.

May habit

It is already May, which means I’m going to try to add a new good habit to my increasingly-hit-and-miss collection of them.

Social media seems like a good thing to get under control, since it sucks away both time and morale. I will need lots of both this month, since my hopes of my workload easing up a bit this month are dashed, and on top of that I’m in a jury pool. (They say work-related excuses will not get you out of serving, but perhaps a literal nervous breakdown would do it.)

Anyway, the habit is to stop looking at social media on my computer at all, and to keep my phone out of my face until noon, at least (no need to be super-strict on the time, I guess; the habit I want to establish is simply to NOT pick the thing up first thing in the morning). This is a very lame resolution/habit and really should not be hard.

A habit of gratitude

I woke up feeling incredibly stressed about work, so I decided that a good, easy, calming habit to work on for April would be the habit of gratitude. At least gratitude is supposed to be calming. So I hear. I’ve always been a fairly grateful (and, until recently, calm) person in general, so I’ve never gone so far as to write in a gratitude journal or make it a deliberate practice or anything like that. I don’t know if I would even go that far now—I guess what I’m going for is just to remind myself throughout the day to stop and be grateful for the good things in life. And maybe blog or Instagram about them once in a while.

Anyway, in my absolute-ball-of-anxiety state this morning, I tried to calm down and think of some things I was grateful for.

• ATTEMPT ONE, PARAPHRASED: “I’m really grateful that Horrible Thing A that I always worry about has not happened. Yet. No, wait. I’m grateful that Horrible Thing B has never happened to me. Oh, those poor people who it has happened to. It could still happen at any time. No, wait…”
• ATTEMPT TWO, PARAPHRASED: “I thank you, God, that I am not like other people—cheaters, sinners, adulterers. I’m certainly not like that tax collector!”

So that was a bad start. But this evening, as I was looking out the window at the FREEZING RAIN falling on the walk I had planned, my mom happened to call from the car on her way to the mall, where she has been walking with my sister several nights a week. And I was right in time for her to pick me up and let me join them, which was really, really nice and exactly what I needed. So I am grateful for that.

It is amusing me to no end right now that Entry One in the gratitude register is mall walking.

April storm

It’s a new month, so it’s time for an ambitious new habit, preferably something that takes advantage of the spring weather, like…[looks out window]…staying inside in a comfy chair with slippers and coffee!

Here’s a reminder of the habits I’m already trying to keep:

• January: Eat more vegetables (doing fine on that)
• February: Take shorter, cooler showers (I will recommit when the weather warms up)
• March: Start every day at the standing desk (I wouldn’t call it a habit yet)

The very good news for April is that I negotiated fewer hours with the company that is keeping me over-the-top busy, starting next week. That is just in time to help me meet a major deadline for a different client, but hopefully by May the work crisis will be substantially over. One can hope.

At any rate I think I’m going to need an April habit that’s either very easy or very helpful to getting lots of work done. Gotta give it some more thought.

Work spiral

It was a frustrating day because I spent a million hours working but got very little of what I needed to do accomplished. On one hand, I get paid by the hour, so whatever. But on the other hand, all I want right now is to get caught up so that I can work on some personal projects that desperately need attention—like M.H.’s new book—and maybe have some sort of life again. I’ve been continuing to take Saturdays off, but it seems I’m so shell-shocked by the end of every week that all I’ve been managing to do with them is lie around reading, playing around on the internet, and doing crossword puzzles. I think about painting all the time but don’t have the energy to make a decision about what to paint, let alone to get everything out and actually do it.

Reading over the above paragraph, I feel like I’m describing a rather severe problem, but solving it would definitely require getting rid of one or more clients, and I’m not willing to do that. I feel fairly certain that everything will quiet down eventually—my work has always been feast or famine—but it certainly hasn’t happened yet in 2018.

One plus side is that at least my busy period has been while the weather is still lousy. If this is still happening in May, it’s going to be a real problem.

P.S. I feel like I should resolve the burning mystery that I left hanging. So…I was literally picking up the phone to finally call customer service about my locked account when I realized that I wasn’t the one who set up the account at all—it was M.H. And he had his “favorite hobby” recorded in a super-organized spreadsheet. Problem solved! (Hooray, I am not going insane!)

Feels like spring

I may be pushing the outdoor yoga season a bit, as there is still some snow on the back patio, but OUTDOOOOOOOR YOOOOOOGA. Even though it wasn’t quite 50 degrees out, the sun felt wonderful, and now that I’ve had a taste, I’ll be back out there every possible day. (The ability to do this is one of the bigger payoffs of having developed a solo home practice; highly recommend.)

The fact that it’s spring-ish means it’s almost time to decide whether I want to swim with Mik’s team again this summer, and I’m torn. There are some huge downsides (getting up really early, nearly freezing to death) but also some huge upsides (bonding with Mik, free swimming opportunity). Last summer I was glad I had done it, so I guess there’s my answer, except did I mention nearly freezing to death?

Hmm, but also I’ve developed an ability to run a tiny distance since last summer—might be fun to run part of the way home this summer. I think that means I want to do it.

When your favorite hobby is change

One of my online accounts has locked me out, and the security question—of all things—is “What is your favorite hobby?” I don’t know exactly how old the account is, but honestly I find it hard to imagine that I would have ever set that as a security question. Was there a time when I had a “favorite hobby” for more than a month or two? (I know I stuck to triathlon-related interests a lot longer than that, but I have already tried “triathlon,” “running,” “biking,” and “swimming” as answers.)

I mean, I have an entire blog basically dedicated to talking about whatever random thing is interesting me at that moment, and my “hobbies” change so quickly that I don’t even always get around to writing about them before I’m done with then. That or they get incorporated into my life to the point where I no longer find them interesting enough to write about. Here are some of the things I haven’t said a word about here, despite minor obsessions, just since January: my essential oils diffuser, my vibration platform, the Mortified podcast, short morning runs, color knitting patterns, and several new herbal supplements. And that is during a period of time when I was working 11- or 12-hour days six days a week.

I know I need to just call the customer service line and get the account sorted out, but honestly a hatred of calling customer service lines is one of my few true norths.

I won't be offended if you laugh at my art

I’m writing this post from my standing work station, because the Official March Habit o’ the Month is to start each workday standing rather than sitting. Even if I then plop into my chair and sit the rest of the day, it would be a great habit to get into. With the long days I’ve been having, any time out of the chair is a plus.

Speaking of long days, I took Saturday off even though it meant a TREMENDOUS amount of work on Sunday. (I think I’ve reduced my backlog for the coming week to a human-manageable amount, though. My goal is to see that backlog go steadily down now instead of up, which would be a great feeling.)

But the point I’m coming around to is, on Saturday I actually tried to create something fun, just for myself. So I’m sure you already see it down there (lurking), but let me preface it anyway by saying that I recently checked out a library book about portraits that I found incredibly inspiring, and so I decided against all reason that a slightly abstract portrait of an old photo of Mik could be achieved without any training or practice, and that even if the results were hilariously bad, it would still be Interesting Art.

In some ways this is better than I expected (you can tell who it is, for example), but that just makes the hilarious badness shine through in ways I was not expecting at all. Somehow I made him look…sinister? And the whole thing has the gray-green pallor of disease and death? It honestly cracks me up.

I am memorializing this painting here because I think I might keep working on this canvas with some brighter colors. (P.S. to family members: Mik must never see this version.)

The crush

Every morning M.H. asks me what my schedule is for the day, and every day I reply, “I need to work until I die.”

The crushing workload has not let up for one second in all of 2018, and the backlog is getting worse instead of better. A bit of this is my fault for not strategically saying no to things (though I have said no to some things), but the rest of it is sort of the price of being a freelancer. If six of your valued clients need you to work that week—well, you work for six clients that week, unless you want some of them to fire you. Which you do not.

Two things are holding me together, at least most of the time:

1. I do not step into my office or look at my email until 9 a.m. We usually get up at 6 and sort of run around busily until 7, but then I have two hours to have leisurely coffee, leisurely breakfast, leisurely yoga, a leisurely walk, and a short, unsatisfying shower (LOL).
2. I am still taking Saturdays off, though most of the time I am too fried to think of anything particularly fun to do and spend the evening wishing I’d gotten just some freaking work done. This might be part of the process of learning to take a day of rest from my labors, I don’t know.

I almost feel like all that leisure time is the source of my problem, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I mean, I’ve been working from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. or later six days a week…

Made an art

My city has a quarterly event called ArtWalk where you go walk around downtown and look at local art displayed in galleries, restaurants, and other businesses. There are snacks and sometimes live music, and it is great, and I ALWAYS leave with a burning desire to create something of my own but never do.

M.H. couldn’t attend the December ArtWalk, so I invited a friend of mine to come with me instead, and we (she) got to talking to an artist whose work we loved. This woman had a series of workshops, including one called “Paint the Sky,” and my friend and I decided then and there to sign up.

Anyway, the class was last Saturday, we had a blast, and I painted a sky:

I am wavering about whether I’m satisfied with it and whether it’s actually done, but I certainly enjoyed its creation. Plus I have some supplies now, and sort of know how to use them, so I could make another something-or-other. Maybe on a Saturday, since I have the day off. :)

A habit challenge

I mentioned yesterday that I’ve gotten into a good habit of eating more vegetables this month, and it got me thinking that I have other habits—ones I want, and ones I want to lose—that I would like to address, maybe as sort of a theme for 2018. Maybe in a monthly challenge sort of sense. Maybe without going overboard and driving myself insane in the process.

But really. The first thing that comes to mind is that, while I’m a water conservation zealot in every other aspect of my life, I have a habit of taking long, hot showers. The longness of my showers makes me a hypocrite, which is bad, but the hotness of my showers may be even worse, because it’s really tough on my skin, especially in this climate, especially in the winter.

So a goal for February: Get into the habit of taking short, cool showers.

Possible beginning of a new obsession

I’m still sticking to my Plant Paradox–approved diet, but that was a tiny change for me, honestly, and I don’t really feel any different after four weeks. (Maybe, possibly, I’m a little bit narrower in the waist and sleeping a little bit better?) But I am definitely eating a lot more vegetables, which seems like a good habit to have acquired, and I’ve decided to just take it on faith that some sort of internal healing is in fact occurring.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I’ve encountered a lot of information lately about light, and how energy-efficient bulbs and lack of sunlight are really bad for us. I heard one guru say that he believed health was about 10 percent related to diet, 10 percent related to exercise/sleep/lifestyle, and the rest was light, water, and electromagnetic fields. I haven’t had the chance yet to really dig into any of this, but naturally that didn’t stop me from making some immediate lifestyle changes:

• Every morning that the sun is out, I get outside as close to sunrise as possible for a morning walk, sans glasses or contacts—apparently you need that morning sunlight right smack on your retinas with nothing in the way.
• I started keeping my phone in airplane mode almost all the time, unless I’m actually expecting a call.
• I’ve been trying to do as much as possible with the lights in the house off—seeing if I can read near a window, for example, or even doing things by candlelight.

It would sort of suck if it turns out that diet really is of minimal importance to health, because that’s the part I have dialed IN. That doesn’t seem like it can possibly be true, but I do like to keep an open mind and play with new ideas…

Vegetable mania

Turns out my exciting new way of eating is actually not that exciting to write about, except that I can report that you certainly can pop sorghum, and that I found the air popper the best way to do that. It tastes exactly like popcorn but better because you can just eat any unpopped kernels. You have to eat it with a spoon because it’s so teensy, but that is kind of fun.

I’m also eating a ton of vegetables and continuing to branch out a bit. I even bought another jicama. This one I just threw into a giant stir-fry with every other vegetable under the sun, and it was quite good. Tastes exactly like a water chestnut in that context. Other vegetables I’ve eaten in recent days: carrots, broccoli, broccoli sprouts, kale, escarole, romaine lettuce, spinach, bok choy, chard, parsnips, parsnip greens, radishes, radish greens, two kinds of onions, three kinds of mushrooms, asparagus, cauliflower, sweet potato, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, scallions, cilantro, garlic, ginger, chives, and avocado, which is actually a fruit. (I know I’m bragging, but I’m also counting. 30!)

I’m a vegetable fiend now; ask me anything.

Fun and excitement on the menu

So after those three days of really restricted eating, things have loosened up a bit on this Plant Paradox plan. But I didn’t want to just go back to eating exactly the way I was before (minus tomatoes and cucumbers and a couple of other foods with the dreaded lectins) so I decided to try some other things the author had talked about.

• First off was nuts. I had decided they were bad for me, but apparently that’s because I was eating the wrong ones. (Cashews and peanuts bad. Macadamias, almonds, pistachios, and pecans goooood.) The book says to limit nuts to about a quarter-cup a day, which isn’t much, but it has been fun having them back on the menu at all.
• Another thing I had given up was cheese, but the book talked a bit about how certain European cheeses were less problematic because of the fact that the milk comes from different breeds of cows. I noticed that my store had real Parmesan cheese, from Italy, that met all the requirements, so I brought home a little block of it. YUM. I’ve been making huge green salads as an excuse to shave cheese onto them. It’s probably good that it is so expensive, because otherwise I would just make a meal-replacement shake out of it.
• Third, radishes. I used to eat them raw sometimes as a kid, but they were not my favorite. But I had heard that cooking mellows them out, so I added some to a stir-fry I was making (along with all their greens). I was surprised at just how mellow they got—in fact they were really delicious that way. So that’s a no-brainer to add to the veggie rotation.
• Finally, sorghum. Apparently it’s one of only a couple of grains without a hull, so it doesn’t have the problematic aspects of most grains, PLUS YOU CAN POP IT LIKE POPCORN. I haven’t actually tried that yet, but I just wanted to you to brace yourselves.

January 4

I’m feeling pretty chipper for someone who has 48 hours to do approximately 50 hours of work to meet a deadline that was originally supposed to be today. And that’s if I take Saturday off as planned. I can’t decide if it would be stupider to do it or not do it. Simple math says I should work. But my heart says if I make an exception now, I’ll be making exceptions all the time, and then what’s the point?

So I could really use tomorrow to be a magical day of energy and productivity so that I can get enough done to be comfortable taking a day off. But like I said I am actually feeling pretty good, especially for having spent so much time in a chair, staring at a screen. I have to wonder if it’s the fancy diet—probably too early to claim so.

January 2

New Life Plan(s) update:

• Plant Paradox diet: Day 2, and it surprised me how full I could stay on vegetables, avocado oil, a handful of nuts, and a tiny bit of chicken. The book claims that excess animal protein stimulates your appetite, so maybe there’s something to that. I’m open to the idea of permanently altering my diet to include less meat; it would be cheaper, for one thing.
• Social media fast: Day 2, and I’ve hardly noticed I’m abstaining from anything. Which is funny, because in December when I tried to stay off Twitter and Facebook one day a week, I caved every time. That addicted, can’t-stop-checking feeling is horrible—and it’s most of the reason why I’m taking another month off.
• Yoga with Adrienne: Day 1 of the official 30-days-of-yoga was today, although I did another one of her videos on Jan. 1. The major difference between Adrienne’s choreography and mine is that I almost never hold a pose to the point where my muscles start shaking—that’s one way to infuse fresh life into my home practice, I guess.

Plant Paradox program

It was so ridiculously cold here last night that my parents had to cancel their annual New Year’s party, and as a result I was in bed before 10 (with two extra blankets piled on) and slept for ten hours straight. I woke up feeling amazing and, because the days are so short, I still got to see the sun rise on 2018. That is how you start off a new year.

I used the morning to reread the relevant chapter in “The Plant Paradox” and make a shopping list. I held off on eating until M.H. woke up and could get to the grocery store—what, me leave the house?—and then I cooked up a bunch of stuff:

• A stir-fry with chicken, bok choy, onions, leeks, broccoli, and mushrooms
• Guacamole with half a red onion, cilantro, avocado, salt, and lemon juice
• Asparagus roasted in avocado oil
• Kale chips

This diet starts off with a three-day “modified fast” in which you eat only certain vegetables, nuts, avocados, and a small amount of chicken or fish. As you can see, I had quite a bit of cooking to do so that I’d have compliant foods around the house (not to mention the chopping I did for future salads).

I thought it would be fun to chronicle what if anything happens as I go through the program, which is supposed to be six weeks after this three-day phase. I think my diet was already pretty good, so I’m not expecting a ton of change, but maybe I will be surprised.