What's helping, you ask?

Going off fruit. Yes. Five days into my fruit fast, I am feeling a difference in my mood. I woke up feeling much lighter this morning. I got eight hours of sleep, so I'm sure that helped a lot. But the dark mood that I've been feeling for the last month or so seems to have lifted.

I am interested to see how I feel on the coming weekend. Will I have more energy? I hope so, everything is going to heck in a handbag around here! I stopped making my bed, I've stopped folding my clothes, my room is in disarray, it's so obvious for me having had some energy to see what happens when my energy level drops.

I actually did have one small piece of fruit today… one of the volunteers at my job walked by me with this little white paper bag. I asked her what she had, and she asked me if I like figs? I LOVE figs. She gave me a small one about the size of a walnut. She said she had helped to pick figs in California visiting some friends for the weekend. I didn't even think about the fact that I was on a fruit fast, until I ate the last bite. It was a purple fig, with a reddish color inside. Very delicious and tasty.

Now sometimes when a person falls off the diet, they figure just go all out for the rest of the day, but I was good and stopped at the one fig.

One of my snacks at work sometimes is to walk to the convenience store on the corner and get a bag of walnuts [affiliate link], a bottle of Perrier and a banana. By the way, Perrier is not GAPS legal to my knowledge. It is one of my periodic cheats. How bad can water be? The carbonation is not good for the digestive system, apparently. Anyway, there were the bananas. They sell them for twenty cents each. And some of them had pretty brown spots. Perfectly ripe and the way we're supposed to eat bananas on GAPS. A bite of banana, and a bite of cashews are so delicious together.

But I didn't buy the banana. I didn't let it tempt me. I just ate the cashews and drank my Perrier.

Lunch was leftover roast, spinach, onions [affiliate link] and carrots from last week. I brought Wednesday's dinner leftovers to work last Thursday – I brought twice as much as I usually eat – on purpose, because I knew I'd be staying late for the evening event. But I never did make it back to the kitchen. I was a little nervous about eating food that was so many days old, but it had been refrigerated well and tasted just fine.

Dinner tonight was hamburger patties with sauteed bell peppers and onions, and steamed spinach. Oh my goodness, so delicious. I had enough left over to take to lunch tomorrow.

I was thinking today, it is going to be interesting to see how I do during the holidays.

I know one thing… it is such a wonderful feeling to not overfill my stomach like I used to. I have probably said this before, but I think what used to happen is the food would bloat up in my stomach after half an hour or so. Maybe I would have eaten a small enough portion to not feel stuffed, but then after the food bloated up I felt miserable.

The other night, when my son had his birthday party food, that would have been one of those nights when I would have pigged out on the sub sandwiches, pizza and ice cream cake. I would have eaten too much, and felt miserable afterwards, and would have been asking myself why was I doing that to myself. It's so nice to not have to feel that way.

Here's to a better day tomorrow! How are you doing on your GAPS journey?