First Week And A Piece

For those of you keeping score, it is now a week and a piece since I began my grand experiment of having no breads and sugars among my food choices.

Well I have one transgression—I should more rightly say two, I guess—to report. This past Sunday evening, we had a church meeting over dessert. A dear friend who is an outstanding baker provided the goodies: Chocolate cakes with chocolate icing and cute little designs piped in white, and a vanilla cake topped with strawberries and vanilla icing. I had one serving of each.

The following night, for supper, I purchased a salad from Quizno’s, and it came with a piece of some kind of flatbread cut in half. I took one small bite out of one of the halves, just to see how it tasted, and tossed the rest. In my opinion, it doesn’t really add anything to the salad, so next time I will ask them to leave it off.

So what have I had today?

Breakfast: 10:00 a.m. – 2 bananas

Lunch: 1:30 or thereabouts – portion of roast chicken breast without skin (I ate it already) with Pace’s™ Triple Pepper salsa

Lemonade made with ¼ C agave nectar, ¼ C lemon juice, and enough cold water to bring it to 2 C total

I haven’t had supper, yet, but I’ve put some chicken wings into the oven. I’m going to have them with heart of romaine with celery, topped with a little mayonnaise. For later, I have a choice of desserts. Both are different single fruits blended with agave nectar, milk, and cream and thrown into the freezer. One is strawberry, and the other is sprite melon. For those who have never had sprite melon before, it is smooth like a honeydew, but it’s pale yellow-white instead of light green, and the taste is different.

Now, I tried to make a rub with hot paprika, garlic powder, sage, thyme, Old Bay seasoning, cinnamon, and salt. I wet the chicken in a base of olive oil with hot sauce, agave nectar, and some of my spice mix. If anyone has any good sauce and rub recipes, please feel free to submit them. I’d like them to not have more than 10 ingredients, please; and if any of your ingredients are exotic, please include information on how I may acquire them.

So how am I feeling? That’s important, because three of the supposed benefits of the bread- and sugar-free life are that one’s mood is significantly improved, one loses weight, and one experiences significant pain reduction.

So far, I can’t say I’ve seen much out of the ordinary that isn’t attributable to other things. I’ve just ended “that time”, and this is normally the point in my cycle when I feel the best. I normally expect to continue feeling relatively good until I ovulate, at which point, due to associated hormone changes, I will experience an increase in pain, my mood will become flat or negative, and I will become bloated or otherwise gain some weight from water retention. To complicate matters for this month, I suffered a muscle spasm July 3, two days before I started the experiment. Subsequent to this I have now been to the chiro four times, so of course, I would expect at this point to have less pain. I suppose the test for me will be to see how I fare in another two weeks or so.

The only things I can say I’ve thus far noticed that aren’t attributable to my cycle are that when I went out today, I was less short of breath than I have been in awhile when walking for any distance or up hills And when I got home, although I was somewhat tired from my trip, I did not feel as drained as I have in the past, nor did it take as long to recover. These may be the results either of the experiment or of the weather today, which was dry, with temperatures in the mid-80’s, which is cooler than normal for this time of year in this part of the country. This coming Friday is forecast to be more humid and may be warmer, so we’ll see when I go out again.

And that’s all folks! Sorry not to have made this a little more interesting, but It’s after six in the evening, my chicken wings aren’t getting done fast enough to suit me, and I’m hungry!