Blood sugar diet - day 5

Well, after a difficult day 3, yesterday turned out really well. I was quite nervous as I have choir rehearsal on Wednesday evenings and wasn't sure how that would work out. My friend had to cancel lunch so that made my day a whole lot easier, I have to admit. I'd had porridge for breakfast an cleaning the floors and clearing up the sitting room were shelved. After a quick trip to the market for some salad (they had oakleaf lettuce! Small heads of it admittedly but that, more than anything, makes it feel like spring has truly sprung), eggs and quark, I chopped up some apples for my snack/lunch and headed off on the tram again for another long walk. Half an hour later, I got out and walked down towards the river, passing a small market which also had a fish stand. They're there every Wednesday so I might take a trip back next week to buy some fish.

I walked back home, this time pusing myself a little to walk to the bench past the big bridge before taking a break. It's not a big difference really but I want to try and push myself a little bit from time to time. Otherwise, I just walked along, enjoying the occasional ray of sunshine through the mostly white clouds. I walked the last bit a slightly different way simply because the traffic lights were against me and so I walked on to cross over at a later stage and I actually cut a short distance off the walk but it was still just over 11km and I am very pleased that I've done two long walks this week. I'll do another shorter one today. I wasn't really hungry by the time I got home, even though I hadn't even finished all of the apple. I rested for a while and then before going to choir I fried the chicken I had bought, as well as some bacon bits I wanted to use up (fried the entire packet but only used a small amount) and made up a huge salad with the meat on top. Totally delicious and it really filled me up. I even went for a drink after choir (water, obviously) and wasn't feeling too hungry at all. I was kind of glad that everyone decided to have an early night though. Once I got home I had the rest of the apple. It turned out to be a great day foodwise.

Today is presenting challenges once more. It's actually related to something I was contemplating the other day: I'm not sure how well I would be managing the blood sugar diet if I had to be going out to work every day. As it is, I have far more flexibility in when and what I eat at the moment, which is a big help. I did get in a translation job yesterday evening, however, which means that today, I'm at my laptop working. And within a few minutes of sitting down, I found myself getting something of a craving for sweets. Not a bad physical craving but more like a force of habit kind of thing. I'd just eaten a late breakfast of two scrambled eggs with cress and thought I just needed to let that digest properly and I'd be fine. But after a while (about forty-five minutes, I was keeping an eye on it to make sure) I was feeling hungry so rather than risk the craving getting worse, I decided to have the rest of the chicken. I just ate it cold as I was working, it was delicious and seems to have satisfied me better than just the eggs had. I suppose every day is different and I'm going to have to be careful to pay attention to what my body (and my psyche) needs at any point in time.

Browsing the Irish Times earlier I also noticed a photo of some Easter eggs and I'm glad I'm here and not in Ireland. I think resisting the type of Easter eggs I grew up with would be far more difficult than resisting the various things they have over here for Easter. Don't get me wrong. I love German Easter stuff, from the chocolate bunnies to the amazing pastries, breads and cakes. I just don't feel the same connection to it as to, for example, a Button's egg (Jesus! You really can find anything on youtube!).

So we'll see how the rest of the day goes. Dinner will be another big salad, although with fewer extras since I've already eaten the chicken. Perhaps I'll make another small portion of spiced dahl. I also want to put on some beans to soak so that tomorrow I can have beans and rice. Really looking forward to that.

And just to finish off so that I have written it down somewhere, yesterday and the day before I noticed a strange pain. Almost like the beginnings of stitch except higher up and more to the centre of my body. I wondered if I had strained something. For a brief second I was worried that maybe I've left it too late to lose weight and get fit and my heart was complaining. But it's too low down to be my heart. It has gone away today but if it comes back, don't worry, I will go and check with the doctor. What I thought was interesting though, is that I checked a diagram to see what exactly is in that part of my body. Biology lessons are a very long time in the past and never one of my best subjects and I really just couldn't remember. At any rate, it seems to be the area that my liver is in that was hurting. The interesting part is remembering the following from the BSD book: "Once your visceral fat levels start to drop (and this happens within days), the fat clogging up your liver will also beging to melt away like snow under a hot sun." It may be a bit fanciful but I'm wondering if my liver is protesting having to relinquish the warm and cosy layer of fat it has been encased in for years now (even though I don't think visceral fat is so much fat around the liver as it is in the liver, that just doesn't work as well for my fanciful image). So there you have it. I weighed myself yesterday on the way out. I had weighed myself in the early afternoon of day 2 (chemist that has the scales I use wasn't open on Sunday) and by yesterday late morning, I was 1.1kg down. That's pretty good going and was definitely good motivation to keep me walking yesterday.