BlueKoala: Riding my own bike...

[BlueKoala]

Today is my day 31 so here I go, taking off the training wheels and riding my own bike.   Keeping a log helped for the W30 and I hope it will help for reintroductions as well.

I am fortunate enough not to have any major health concerns, but I'd like to keep the energy and focus I acquired during my W30, and also lose some more weight.  I'm down about 10 pounds and I still need to lose about 40 more.    Although faster is better, I really don't care if the weight comes off slowly as long as it comes off and stays off.

I don't think I'll be venturing too far from the basic W30 template in future - I've been Paleo(-ish) for a while and I do very well on it and find it generally pretty easy to follow - but I'd still like to know how certain foods affect me.   

The upcoming weekend is not going to be conducive to food experimentation (I'll be doing the Glass Slipper Challenge at Disney) so I'm going to see how things go, and if I need to go back on W30 for a bit after I get back in order to get things sorted out, I will.   

Starting with dairy today, because I would like to keep it in my diet.   I love butter and cheese and the occasional cream-based sauce.    

Meal 1:  3 scrambled eggs in butter, with shredded cheese and spinach.

Meal 2:   Roasted salmon (leftover from last night) with more butter, citrus aioli sauce, and a bowl of golden cauliflower soup.

Snack:  7 oz plain Fage Greek yogurt.    (I don't know if Greek yogurt has changed or my tastes have, but I didn't like this at all.  It tasted like school glue.   If I were going to eat this again in future I would put berries in it, but the fruit-flavored varieties available at the store all had nasty sugary/starchy things added to them, so I decided to start with plain so the reintroduction wouldn't get too complicated.)    Also had one quarter of a navel orange.

Meal 3:  2 HB eggs, wedge of blue cheese, slice of roasted duck, handful of frozen cherries.    It has been such a long time since I had blue cheese.  It is delicious!   Eating it was like....dessert!

Tonight when I make my evening cup of tea I'm going to add a little cream to it.    I have some strongly flavored looseleaf black teas that really need cream to make them palatable.

Absolutely no negative effects noted so far.  Fingers crossed that this continues.   

[BlueKoala]

Finished off the blue cheese today but no other dairy was consumed.   

And....sadly, I must report that my digestive system does not seem to appreciate dairy the way my tastebuds do.    It's complaining today and the symptoms started late yesterday.    Everything is comparatively mild and probably would be worth putting up for in exchange for a fancy French cheese or a really great cream sauce, but I don't really see the value of going through this discomfort just so I can throw shredded Costco-brand  cheese into a breakfast scramble that would be perfectly tasty without it. 

(Note that I had my DNA tested last year and so I know for a fact that I am not genetically lactose intolerant.  And I have been eating cheese and dairy for years and would have sworn that I was fine with them.   And still, this.   Okay.   It is what it is.)   

So dairy has now been moved to the list of Special Occasion Foods.   Except I still need to break this experiment down a little bit more, because yesterday's dairy allotment was much higher than usual and included a lot of foods I don't want or expect to eat every day.     On a daily basis, what I'm more likely to be doing is eating small amounts of butter once or maybe twice a day (to cook my breakfast eggs, or use as a fat/oil on dinner vegetables, or because it's been added to something I'm eating in a restaurant...)   I still need to figure out what the effects of this are.   

Maybe I just don't get along well with blue cheese? :/   (Oh, blue cheese....I love you so much....why don't you love me back??) 

Also off-plan today:  white wine, which I am logging so I can track the patterns.  (I much prefer red, but I'd already noticed pre-W30 that it can set off digestive mumbles and I didn't want that to confuse the rest of the re-introduction.)

This is going to be a longer journey than I thought....