vegan diet | Eat Light, Be Light

Well, the days are really flying by here.

Last night I discovered the lovely cookbook I bought at the beginning of my experiment buried under a stack of research books on my bedside table. I am a total geek when it comes to research, and have been since I was about 18.

I don’t read fiction, although that was all I read up until 18, and huge amounts of it. Then I switched to non-fiction and that is pretty much all I have read since then. I read quickly, absorb a lot of information easily, and seem to have have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. Not knowledge of recipes though, I guess.

Mostly with food, I have been “winging it”. And I seem to be doing ok. The gnawing hunger of the first week has pretty much gone away, even if I forget to pack a snack, I’m not getting that pointed, voracious feeling.

I’ve been good with just one veggie burger on my salad at lunch, don’t need 1 1/2 anymore. A third of a package of tempeh is sufficient instead of an entire half.

This morning I am trying hemp milk in my coffee instead of almond milk. I think it tastes better although it has a lot more calories. Generally I don’t care about calories but the last time I went on a hemp milk kick, about 5 years ago when it first came out, I put on weight and that was the only thing I changed in my diet.

Speaking of weight, after a few days of feeling a bit too skinny, I seem to have equalized again. Entire bags of coconut macaroons will probably do that to you 🙂

Multiple cartons of hemp milk will do that too, and since I want my weight to stay the same and not go up, I will probably just enjoy this one and then go back to almond milk for now. In 10 days, at least from this perspective, I think I have every intention of going back to raw cows milk in my cappuccino though…

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Sitting down to breakfast: tempeh sauteed with crimini and shitake mushrooms, spinach and parsley. I made a marinade of sesame oil, tamari, red wine vinegar, and sesame seeds. It’s good. But it’s not eggs. I’m still attached to the idea of eggs.

Homemade coconut macaroons

Sitting down for lunch with a bowl of canned black bean chili and some sesame blues corn chips. Corn is one of the things that I am minimizing but this is organic gmo free blue corn, so I’m having a few.

And can you guess what I am craving? What non-vegan thing goes so nicely with chili? Yes, CHEESE!

Some grated Cabot Seriously Sharp cheddar would be SO DELICIOUS on top of my chili!

Or would it? I have to say, I really am feeling good. Light and clear already. No stomach discomfort at all, which is something I have been plagued with to varying degrees over my life. Cheese being one of the culprits in that.

So in my mind I have this idealized perspective on how good cheese can taste, especially at certain times and with certain things – but it’s never really sat well in my belly.

Speaking of my belly, it’s gotten flatter, firmer, more toned – and I haven’t even been exercising. I had been doing the Insanity workout before I started my vegan experiment. For those of you not familiar, Insantiy is a hardcore, jumping, sweating, calorie burning, metabolism revving workout that brings about cardiovascular and core muscular fitness pretty quickly.

I decided I was better off without it since I’m already challenged enough to get sufficient calories into myself without making it more challenging by burning extra. I’ve been doing a little yoga instead.

I noticed yesterday morning that my pajama bottoms were falling off me. I don’t have a scale and generally don’t weigh myself so I don’t really know how much weight I’ve lost. Losing weight isn’t the point of this experiment – in fact, I would prefer NOT to lose weight. What I’m most curious about is the effect of this kind of eating on how I FEEL.

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So, when it came time to make dinner, I wasn’t hungry. I realized that today is the first day that I’ve eaten beans since I started this, and while I’m happy for how long they spelled me for (I didn’t get hungry until about 8 o’clock, but I was in the middle of watching my son’s high school play so there wasn’t much I could do about it), I actually felt a little indigestive and bloated by the black bean chili I had for lunch at 12:30 (even without the cheese!).

Maybe the more you eat beans the less they bother you? I also vaguely remember from when I was on a macrobiotic diet 20 years ago that cooking them with kombu makes them more digestible – but when you buy canned chili you can’t do much about that.

So, while I should have been making dinner for myself, I was actually having an inspired moment and making dessert. Have you ever had those Hail Merry coconut macaroons? I had a bag on the counter and had eaten a few earlier in the day. I picked up the bag and looked at the ingredients and realized that I had all the ingredients in it on hand: shredded coconut, maple syrup, almond flour (well, I actually had the almond meal leftover from making almond milk) and coconut oil (except I used this coconut butter that I got that is amazingly delicious). I threw in some chia seeds too, because they just happened to be sitting on the counter.

I came home from the play and had a few macaroons. I don’t feel like eating a meal at 10pm, so I am going to bed kind of hungry. Tomorrow is Sunday. I will probably wake up craving eggs benedict…

Eat Light, Be Light

Eating one step away from the sun

Tag Archives: vegan diet

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