Un-dulgence

So my indulgence on Wednesday was supposed to be a chocolate pie with lavender vanilla gellato; however, they were out of the gellato, so I had to settle for vanilla frozen yogurt (which turned out to be a harbinger of the diet to come):




I ate this as a very late afternoon (OK, evening) snack, then went home and had dinner. It tasted good, but having eaten nothing but healthy for the past month, I could definitely sense the void of the "empty calories." And honestly, 20 minutes after finishing this thing off, my stomach felt a little upset, and my head started to hurt a little. My body definitely welcomed the shrimp & veggie salad an hour later.

Just prior to the "un-dulgence," I had traveled to Philadelphia for work, Monday through Tuesday morning. I had a PCP lunch that I brought, but dinner was with co-workers at a Mexican place. I did all right: shrimp ceviche with salsa and avocados--I picked off the way-too-buttery spicy popcorn off the top--along with a Mexican chop salad, naked--no dressing, no cheese. Though I had to do my best to pick off the tortilla fragments sprinkled on top. While I've known we live in a carbo-culture, following the diet really makes one realize just how much our cuisine is in a dysfunctional, co-dependent relationship with simple starches & sugars, too insecure to let a salad just be itself.

Aside from not being measured (I probably over-ate on the veggies, under-ate on the protein) and, as usual, too salty, I don't think I did too badly. I resisted gorging on the carb & fat-laden fare that my co-workers were enjoying washing down with their high-end margaritas. Breakfast at the hotel was a piece of toast, some scrambled egg (equivalent to about 1 real egg), fried potatoes (ugh--the only veggies available at the breakfast buffet!), and a cup of milk. Oh, and nice, low-cal coffee.

I'm actually a little relieved now that our dinners consist of a banana, an apple, an egg white, and milk; it's definitely going to save some preparation time--and make it easier to "dine out."