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I got to bed around 7 last night, and was up by 3:30 this morning. Woke up naturally. I seem to do best when I wake naturally. I made my bed, and then I decided to get in a quick workout on my Total Gym. I am doing such a light workout that it only took about five minutes. It was so nice having it done so I didn’t have to think about doing a workout after I got off work. I end up NOT doing a workout usually.

I have to do a really quick report. It’s already 7:10pm. I am so much better the next day when I get enough sleep.

So here’s my food report for the day:

Breakfast around 5am: A few bites of leftover salad from last night. I was just a little bit hungry and needed to eat something.

Snack around 9am: The rest of the leftover salad that I brought with me to work.

Lunch: 12:30 Leftovers from last night – butter fried chicken breast and vegetables with plenty of butter!

Dinner around 4:30: Chili and salad made with cucumbers, tomatoes, Cortido sauerkraut, olive oil, raw apple cider vinegar, and an avocado.

I have a feeling I’m going to get really hungry one of these days. Or maybe I’m eating less since I’m not eating fruit (duh, I already figured that fruit had a tendency to make me eat more a couple of months ago).

My hubby bought me a new shirt yesterday, it was a size 12-14 and a bit too snug this morning, so I didn’t wear it to work. I think I’ll be able to wear it next month. We’ll just see.

And now I must go to bed.

Oh yes, and I didn’t eat fruit again today. That’s four days.

One more thing. My husband and I might go on a couple of days vacation – his father has offered him his frequent flyer rewards for two plane tickets. My biggest concern… what will I eat!?

‘Night.

Starlene

Usually after dinner everyone just piles their dishes into the kitchen, in the sink or on the counters. My husband usually washes the dishes when he gets up in the morning.

Tonight after I ate dinner my only thought was to write a Daily Report on how my day went today, but then I thought, maybe I should just tidy up the kitchen… maybe it won’t be so hard to clean on the weekends if I stay on top of it every night after dinner.

It took me 15 minutes to wash the dishes (by hand, we don’t have a dishwasher and I would own one anyway), wipe the counters and the stove. I washed three sinkfuls of dishes and dried and put two loads away. And we have those deep sinks! I can’t believe how many dishes we use. My youngest son actually made dinner for us tonight, and he washed the dishes earlier in the day, and the kitchen was tidy when we got home. After dinner it was like a whirlwind had struck.

He cooked butter fried chicken breast and vegetables earlier in the day so they were cold once I got home. I put on some frozen green beans because he hadn’t made enough vegetables for dinner, and for my lunch tomorrow. I also put together a salad.

I had to take Kava Kava today. I had a problem with our financial database and it was messing with my head, I couldn’t figure it out. I got up and took a walk around the building, on the outside. That helped me to clear my head. I wanted to just ignore the problem, but it was one of those problems where you have to face it and figure it out or else you can’t go on to anything else.

Food roundup for the day:

Breakfast on the way to work: 2 cups vegetable soup with butter

Snack about 9am: avocado

About 11am I walked over to the Circle K for cashews, they come in a 1.5 ounce. They are a cheat since they are roasted, and so they are GAPS illegal

Then I got so busy I didn’t eat anything else for the rest of the day. I was okay with it. I could feel myself getting a little bit on edge and irritable, but I handled it.

I was really glad when I found out my son had made the butter fried chicken breasts, one of my favorite things.

So dinner was butter fried chicken breast, salad, and vegetables with butter.

I had enough leftover for lunch.

I did not work out today, but I did keep my goal to not eat any fruit. Yay me!

And my goal was to be in bed by 6:30 and it just turned 6:31 on my computer’s clock. I had better say good night!

‘Night!

I had a pretty good day today. I was successful at not eating fruit, and I did a workout on my Total Gym.

If you divide 240 by 30 days, I’ve been on GAPS for eight months, but my actual anniversary date is tomorrow, the 6th.

Time sure flies.

Food roundup:

Breakfast –  about 1/2 cup cooked chicken with 1 – 1/2 cups leftover vegetable soup, with extra butter

Snack – about 1/2 cup vegetable soup leftover from breakfast

Lunch – about 1/2 cup cooked chicken with cooked spring onions [affiliate link], some tabasco and butter

Dinner – French Onion Mushroom Soup and grilled Top Sirloin

I didn’t have any fermented foods today I just realized, and it is one of my goals to have fermented foods every day. I guess if you count water kefir, I did have a swig of that.

I am just guesstimating on the amounts of the chicken I had today. I’m not doing portion control or anything like that. I’m eating to satisfaction which is a million times easier when the food is good, but not addictive.

My youngest son baked a white cake from scratch using cake flour. It smelled kind of good, but not tempting. It is pretty amazing to me that these foods no longer interest me. I keep thinking maybe I’m just lying to myself and pretty soon I’m going to go berserk and start scarfing a bunch of foods that are not legal on GAPS. It hasn’t been too hard to not have fruit. It’s weird how sometimes it is so much easier to do something. I was planning to avoid fruit in June and July, but it seemed harder. This month, so far, it has not been too much of an issue.

I will try to find time to share the French Onion Mushroom Soup that I put together tonight.

Well, it’s my bedtime, so I should get off this computer.

Starlene

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