Day 38

Wow, lots of stuff to catch up on!

Patrick: Welcome back to Japan! Looks like you had fun at the grocery stores in Hawaii (from that Lucerne cream cheese package, I'm guessing you went to Safeway). Looking forward to more posts on the state of American food!


Saya/Mike/Minami/Kaz: Thank you so much for running the weekly PCP sessions for the last two weeks! :)


New exercises: The pistol squat and the bicycle are seriously kicking my @$$ right now, but it's going to be awesome when I can get to the point where I can do them confidently and in proper form.

New meal plan: No positive spin here - I've been sticking to the decreases for the past few weeks, but it is REALLY HARD. Mickey hit the nail on the head when she describes it feeling like your stomach is eating itself by snack time! Over the past few weeks, I've noticed the following pattern every week the portions decrease:

Days 1-3 - constantly hungry (except after lunch)
Days 4-7 - not as bad, but ONLY if I time all my meals perfectly

That's the thing, if I don't eat that snack EXACTLY 2 hours (or earlier) after the previous meal, I get extremely hungry and irritable. If I'm at home, it's doable, but at work more often than not something happens and I can't nail the timing. I'm hoping as I continue to experience this, I can become more accustomed to controlling my irritability due to my body feeling hungry...

In terms of exactly what we are eating and the no salt/no sugar thing, suprisingly I am not having that hard of a time with that aspect. I think my sense of taste has actually gotten stronger because I am starting to enjoy the natural taste of things now (like steamed veggies, boiled egg whites, etc) with minimal or not additional seasonings. And the natural sweetness of fruit and milk...WOW! Call me strange, but I'm pretty content with just eating boiled egg whites alone with no salt/seasonings. Now if we could only up the number of boiled egg whites....;)

Indulgences: in the name of transparency, I have double-dipped in this - one planned and one unplanned. The planned indulgence was 2 beers and 5 sticks of kushiyaki (breaded, fried veggies/meat on skewers) because I was meeting a friend I haven't seen in a long time and the original place we planned on going to (which serves yakitori - barbequed chicken on skewers) was full. The unplanned indulgence was at a work gathering last week where I had 1 beer and a very small slice of margherita pizza (the rest of the night I ate vegetable sticks). It all tasted REALLY GOOD, but the next day my stomach did feel "heavy". One thing that I do like about what we are eating is that even when I was eating a lot in week 2, my stomach never felt "heavy" (the way it feels after I eat a bacon barbeque cheeseburger with fries and a chocolate shake). PCP has made it even clearer for me what foods my body can digest easily and what it cannot.