I’m now coming to the end of my fourth week of keeping a food diary, and the changes I feel are immense. Things have started to become really clear since the first report was posted last Friday…the difference I’ve experienced over the past week is greater than the first three weeks put together.
To recap a little, by the end of last week I’d begun to really notice the benefits of eating lighter, with a lot more salads and various superfoods added to my diet. I was feeling a lot more energy and had cut down on my coffee intake. I didn’t know what to do with all the extra energy I had, so I returned to serious training for the first time in five years. Since then I’m waking up fresh and full of life every morning, looking forward to work and training.
Concurrently, it seems that the general improvement in my diet is allowing my body to process the bad stuff more efficiently; last weekend was quite unhealthy. Taking a break from training on Friday left me restless, and I followed a Greek feast of haloumi, falafel, tsatsiki, pita bread and salad with a gig in the city at which I drank way too much.
Saturday morning at 8am brought the expected results…ooow! After a cup of tea and an omelette I decide to head into the city for training, with a bad hangover. It’s a tough workout but afterwards I feel excellent: positive and energetic. I have an overpriced wheatgrass smoothie from some juice bar near Flinders Street and do some shopping before returning home to salad and tempeh. I still feel a bit rough from last night’s excess, but it’s not so bad due to the training session and good food. A BBQ at a mate’s place with salad, tofu sausages and gluten chicken plus about six beers before a late night snack of cheese on toast leaves me feeling surprisingly okay the next morning.
With my fiancé’s birthday coming on Monday, Sunday’s looking excessive from early on. Poached eggs w/ smoked salmon, asparagus, spinach, home-made hollandaise and a nice coffee leaves me feeling well-fed but not stuffed, though the planned afternoon at the pub isn’t exactly what I feel like. Nonetheless I do my duty and manage to choke down an unreasonable quantity of alcohol and a half bowl of chips, followed in the evening with a kangaroo fillet w/ mash, beetroot and gravy (which is delicious). A vegan cheesecake at home requiring attention caps off an extremely OTT weekend in the food stakes. I try to make up for it by drinking gallons of water before bed.
Monday arrives with a green smoothie for breakfast and I feel fine. Lunch is a delicious tofu & bean burrito and a nice coffee. By the afternoon I feel awful; nervous and irritable with zero concentration. An intense evening training session leaves me in a great mood to take my other half out for a fancy birthday meal of sashimi, unagi yakatori and gyoza, though I’m still wondering about the afternoon’s low energy and negative mindset. This is obviously partly due to the weekend’s food and drinks, though I’m feeling as if the coffee is also largely responsible. Probably it’s both. All the same, I decide I’ll completely cut out coffee for the next few days. I first started regularly drinking coffee about six years ago whilst working early mornings as a cook. I’d always previously drunk tea, but the ubiquitous pot of coffee on the hotplate proved too tempting to resist…before long I cherished the active mindset which two cups of coffee would bring. Soon it had become a habitual wake-up call rather than a stimulant used for a purpose. Coffee, like any stimulant, is great for a treat or when you need to pull an all-nighter, or perhaps just to kick-start your brain when required. As an everyday habit though…personally I’m starting to realise that it leaves me feeling frustrated, irritable and short-tempered. What a pity…I love my coffee…
