Aim for perfection- you’ll get 80%. I said it yesterday, and I’ll say it again. It is my mantra through this whole process. Diets with strict guidelines are so easy to ditch after one slip up, excuseing yourself from having to participate once you break the rules. “This diet is too crazy, I can’t do it, I give up.” I’ve certainly done that a few times on this particular challenge.

This time, I’m determined to finish 28 days of eating no meat, no dairy, no oil (and I forgot to mention yesterday) no refined sugar. I’ll be asking for a lot of forgiveness, lots of trips to confessional, but the point is to stick with it. Life throws you curve balls every hour of the day and we react accordingly. We all make the best decisions we can in the moment, and sometimes the best decision IS to go out to dinner with your team instead of retreating to your hotel room because you’re afraid of screwing up your diet.

Oh- my mom emailed me yesterday after reading my blog post with an update on her and my father’s meals day one- I need to ask her permission to share thire experience here. They are pretty cute when it comes to eating the E2 way. Mostly, I think, realistic about how you approach and stick with a diet like this if you aren’t a hyperactive health diet lifestyle kind of person.

FOOD DIARY DAY 2

Breakfast: again with the greens and beans. Lentils I had cooked the night before (from my salad) nestled into a bowl with a good 2 cups of steamed kale, topped with ajvar an amazing spicy vegetable relish my friend colleen introduced me to. I used too much and breakfast was a bit hot. It kept me sated through yoga- post yoga however, I was ravenous.

At home I desperately searched for a snack- I should say that whole grains as absolutely allowed on this diet, but wheat and I are on the outs, which means no quick snacks of Dave’s Killer Bread smeared with a tablespoon of almond butter. Thankfully we had a banana, and I devoured it.

Lunch caught me at work unprepared. Craving something warm, I ordered a burrito bowl, rice (which I’m sure contained oil), beans, lettuce, corn, salsa, and chipotle soy curls. I know better than to grace my dish with processed soy protein: a. it probably isn’t on the diet, and b. it absolutely destroys my stomach. It was a moment of weakness, when your mind has a craving, and goes all Veruca Sault on you. “But daddy, I want Chipotle Soy Curls, and I WANT THEM NOW!!!”

Part of my day was spent driving my team up to Seattle in a 15 passenger van, and road snacks include a satsuma, some kale chips, and two too many handfuls of trail mix- cashews, almonds, dried cherries and pineapple.

For dinner  we ended up at a Vietnamese restaurant and I had a spring roll- containing some kind of deliciously crunchy (fried) business that I’m confident isn’t E2 friendly, and a shiitake mushroom bun bowl that was fantastic, though absolutely made with oil, and likely sugar in the lemon grass marinade. Wine was had, one glass, followed by rye, sipped neat with one ice cube. This morning I can feel all the sodium from dinner. May it is the air conditioner too, but I feel completely dried out, like a salt bed.