Day One Hundred Eleven

Breakfast

• peanut butter on Triscuits
• cottage cheese
• sliced kiwi

Somehow I have convinced myself that substituting Triscuits for the bread in a meal makes it easier to prepare. I recognize the fallacy in this, yet I do it anyway and actually use it as incentive to prepare meals ("You don't have to make toast - you can just have Triscuits!"). Yet I will still take the time to peel and slice a kiwi. Go figure.

Lunch

• turkey burger made with peppers and mushrooms on a whole wheat hamburger roll with Dijon mustard
• apple

At first I was grumbling about having to cook the pepper and mushrooms before combining them with the turkey meat (truth be told, I hate having to make patties and I was mostly grumbling about having to touch the meat with my hands), but once I bit into this insanely flavorful, juicy, and moist hamburger, I decided it was totally worth it. Talk about delicious!

I made some for my boyfriend too (as they are thoroughly Atkins-approved), and he enjoyed them immensely - he cut them into strips and had them in a low-carb wrap with some cheese and Ranch dressing, like a falafel of sorts. Clever boy.

The apple was unfortunately mealy and edging toward inedibly overripe in some places - either I must remember to eat fruit before it lingers past recent memory at the bottom of the fruit bowl in the fridge (yes, I've started one of those), or I should stop dropping it so many times on the kitchen floor before putting it away (which most likely contributes substantially to bruising). Either way, this apple was lousy.

I also had a glass of milk later in the day, after finally going to the grocery this evening.

Snack

• garlic & onion soy crisps
• Light cranberry juice (made with Splenda)

I will be honest - I think I am becoming seriously addicted to these soy crisps. They're never really that filling, but that's hardly the point - the flavor is out of this world. The fact that I get to have them with juice just seals the deal every time, such that no matter how hungry I am or how much I say to myself "I really ought to have something more substantive for a snack," the "Oh yes garlic and juice!" impulse wins out every time.

The juice was slightly disappointing, as I'd made a sincere effort to get something low-sugar (the meal plan actually called for "no sugar added," but even those are packed with it). I saw this seemingly healthful cranberry, made by replacing some of the fruit sugar with Splenda, and I thought it was genius... but the flavor is somewhat off. It's nothing to do with sweetness, so much as body, in that it tastes rather watered-down. Too bad I have a huge container of it and will probably be sneaking swigs throughout the next few weeks.

Dinner

• cottage cheese with wheat germ, Triscuits, almonds, sliced kiwi, 1% milk

Laziness strikes again. I'd fallen asleep reading on the couch and when I woke up, it was very tempting to simply transfer myself to bed without dinner. Somehow I convinced myself that breakfast food would be less bothersome than the mini-pizza I'd planned to cook... but then I took it even further with the Triscuits approach to starches and my adamant refusal to put the cottage cheese on my "toast" once I'd mixed it with wheat germ. Really there is nothing wrong with deconstructing meals this way, but it amuses me somehow, the little rationalizations I've made with myself just to get the damn food in my mouth.

I have a running joke with a friend of mine about kiwis - as a child, my brother had never had a kiwi before, so my mother was excited when he asked for one in the store. That Monday, as she prepared his lunch for school, she decided to peel the perfectly-ripe kiwi so he could easily eat it, and she placed it in a plastic baggie. Of course being a rough and tumble boy, by the time his lunch got to the cafeteria, his kiwi looked like a baggie full of snot, for which he was teased mightily. His confusion when he came home that evening was, apparently, priceless (i.e. "Mom, why did you give me a baggie of snot for a snack?!"). I shared this story with a friend when trying to explain how one understands kiwi ripeness, and we've both been daring each other to deliberately smash a kiwi in a baggie and eat it snot-style ever since.

Recently I've had a spate of hard and tart, not-yet-ripe kiwis, which certainly makes them easy to peel, but not exactly appealing (ha!). This kiwi, however, finally reached the heighth of snot-ripedness, and it was soft, slightly sweet, and allover perfect, making me wish I'd thought to smash it in a baggie instead of awkwardly peel it and eat it with my hands.

I'm glad that I convinced myself to eat this meal, though, as it gave me energy to work on some small projects before bed (including writing this entry!), and I'm feeling a lot less groggy-and-cloudy than I was when I first woke up from my nap. Funny, that whole food and energy correlation.