I promised I'd step on the scale this morning, and I did.

My weight today is 190.4#.

I did not weigh myself until I’d been doing GAPS for a couple of weeks, and at that time I weighed 232. On July 1st I weighed 194.0#. For the month of July I lost 3.6#. So my official weight loss in nearly eight months on GAPS: 41.6.

I was happy to see the number had gone down. I have to admit I wished it had gone down further, but I'm not in a race, and this isn't about losing weight! It is hard to keep the diet head from creeping in!

Food roundup:

Breakfast: cold chicken drumstick and 2 queen green olives stuffed with jalapenos

Brunch with my oldest son:  We each had 2 eggs [affiliate link] scrambled, with one medium zucchini squash each, shredded and sauteed, with some jalapeno. And we both had a small condiment bowl of Cortido (Latin American sauerkraut). We also had homemade beef sausage patties (beef that I ground myself the night before and added spices to make them taste spicy).

Lunch/Snack: 2 of the sausage patties, 4 green olives stuffed with jalapenos

Dinner: Two bowls of my husband's delicious chili that he made using white beans. My youngest son made cornbread with delight. He has the greatest time lately teasing his old mom that she can't eat anything “good”. I really used to love cornbread. It was not hard to avoid it; I did great and had none. Not even a crumb.

I've decided to see if I could try another month without fruit.

I started out last month trying to only have fruit on the weekends. That escalated into having fruit pretty much whenever I felt like it. Albeit small amounts, but still, there was fruit and an abundance of it.

So far, I've had no fruit today.

I'm just curious to see what would happen this far into GAPS if I don't eat fruit for the month.

I'm also going to attempt to work out on my Total Gym. I think I used it maybe a total of five to seven times last month. When my husband began using it as a tool corral stash place I immediately stopped trying.

I know, I give up way too easily. At least I'm still making our bed every morning, and he unmakes it every night before he goes to bed. And that doesn't stop me from making it the next morning. 😉

I had a fairly relaxing day today. My best blogging friend broke her blog and between the two of us we put our brains together and fixed it. She was upgrading to 3.0. Scary! But she's back and everything's okay.

My hubby worked on the pantry, but he stopped when we realized my grand plans are maybe too grand (size-wise, that is). I still think my original plan will work, but I was undecided so he said he would stop for the day and let me think about it some more.

The area is really too deep to be of good use for us, as we are not very organized and tend to shove things messily into areas. The area is 24 inches wide and 32 inches deep. That is way too deep for us. We both know things will just get shoved and crammed in and no one will know where anything is. What I was hoping for is to make the end 14 inches into a totally different area, to house my vacuum cleaner, broom and mop. This would be accessed by the north side, while the pantry would be accessed by the west side. The pantry would have then been 24 wide and 18 inches deep. But it seems there are this thing you have to do called framing with 2x4s. Ever heard of them?

Well, they take up about 2 inches for each one of them, and they are going to cut into my plans by a few inches. So we'll see how that turns out.

I have been trying really hard to keep the kitchen cleaned up. It seems to take a lot of stress off everyone when the kitchen is clean. The guys will wash dishes, but I'm the only one that tidies and wipes counters, the stove and sweeps and mops the kitchen floor.

Okay, well enough of that.

My hubby was watching some show on the cooking channel and during the commercials a blogger came on to talk about her blog and her experience of not eating out for two years while living in New York. While Cathy Erway is not doing GAPS, her situation is similar to what a lot of us are doing since we can't really eat out all that easily while doing GAPS. Ms. Erway's book The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove sounds really interesting and I plan on reading it one day soon.

Tomorrow I'll share the recipe for the chili. It made eight quarts!

Oh, and one more thing. Remember how I said that fruit caused me to have insomnia at night? Well, I figured out if I have the fruit much earlier in the day, like before noon, it does not affect my sleep. So that's why I think I ended up eating more fruit, because I could without having it affect my sleep.

Okay, that's all.

‘Night.

Starlene