Day 5

I don't feel thinner, but I'm comparing this to any of those countless times where I did crazy kind of diets and probably just lost a bunch of water the first week... along with 5 pounds.  I need to be patient.  At least I don't feel hungry all the time.

Breakfast:

• Granola with almond milk

Snack:

• Banana with peanut butter and a drizzle of maple syrup

Then I went out shopping with my mom and we stopped at a Chinese restaurant, which was GOING to be a Thai restaurant, but my mom gets confused about these things.  See, I know of some good vegan Thai dishes, so it wasn’t going to be a problem.

And as I’m looking at this Chinese menu, I started remembering that in the documentary (which PROMTED my diet change), it wasn’t about veganism, it was… well, hold on, wiki put it better than I could: “Plant-based diet is a general term that refers to an eating pattern dominated by fresh or minimally processed plant foods and decreased consumption of meat, eggs and dairy products”.

Then I recalled some of the interviews and how they were talking about like, yeah sure there would be meat at the dinner table, but it wasn’t the main course.  It wasn’t like “meat… with some vegetables and rice”.  It was rice and vegetables with a little bit of meat.

I also recall they were saying certain fish were less desirable, but if you’re going to eat fish, here are some better choices.

And I realized, I’m not doing this diet because I want to be vegan; I’m doing this diet because I want to get healthy… by way of restricting/reducing  my processed food and animal product intake.

So my apologies to any vegans out there that I may be offending now, but I think if I have the occasional piece of fish (and that’s really the only animal product I can think of that I can foresee as a small, occasional portion of my diet), that I’m not going to consider it “falling off the wagon”.

I’ve never been a big fan of poultry and I pretty much only liked beef if it was disguised (like in a taco).  I’d eat eggs in a pinch, but they’re certainly nothing I crave.  And that only leaves milk and butter.  Not a huge milk drinker, so it’s easy to find non-animal substitutes for my tea, smoothies, and cereal. 

As for butter, I *know* I’m better off without it.  And I’m even cutting way down on my olive oil consumption.

So back to lunch:

• Five small shrimps, two cups of zucchini, rice, and soup

I ate half there and ate the other half a few hours later at home.

Late snack:

• Smoothie (see earlier entries for my recipe that includes blueberies) and spelt muffin with peanut butter

Now I’m going to bed and visualize the plaque leaving my arteries as my body thanks me for treating it nicely for a change.