Day 40 to 43 – 100-mile diet : A week-end of fun and back to life as “normal”

Sorry it may have looked as though I disappeared for a while. The week-end was a very hectic and fun one and it took a few days to catch up on sleep and get back in the swing of things.

As I had mentioned in my last post, my parents-in-law were here for a quick week-end visit and we had decided to apply the social life amendment in order to make our days a bit more fun filled and a bit less in-home intensive. We didn’t want to cheat too much, but also didn’t want them to feel part of something they hadn’t signed on for so we decided a healthy balance of both would do the trick.

As promised, here is a list of all the foods we cheated by buying and consuming:

• Bread – We bought one bakery country style bread and 2 French-style baguettes.
• Tea – My in-laws love hot tea in the morning so we had pulled out the Orange Pekoe out of our boxes in the spare room.
• Pork filets - We had all 4 parents for dinner Saturday night (who all eat meat) and although we tried our best to find local pork that wasn’t ham, we were unable to. So the un-local pork filets were NOT for lack of effort!
• Tofurky cold-cuts – On Sunday night, with the leftover baguettes and pork, we decided to make deli sandwiches. Since my hubby and I aren’t really big on meat (I’m a vegetarian and he rarely eats meat), we decided to leave the pork for my in-laws and buy ourselves faux-cold cuts.
• Vanilla ice cream – to go with the maple-apple pie I made (which WAS 100-mile).
• Lunches out – Both days, we had lunch outside the home so of course, not local!

And that is pretty much it… Every breakfast item (except for the bread) was local, every fruit and veggie, all dairy – cheese, yogurt, milk, cream, butter – was local, we even took a drive to a local winery for the wine for Saturday night. We used all the oils, vinegars, flours we had at the house. We used all the herbs and local seasonings we had at the house. And even though they added salt and pepper to their meals, we never cooked with it or added some ourselves. All and all, I think we did pretty great! They had a wonderful time and so did we.

Back to life as normal

I will have to admit that after a few days of indulging, it’s been hard to motivate ourselves. Even though we didn’t go overboard with all the over-processed foods, we are missing the convenience of a simple sandwich for dinner. But it is coming back. Bread was made last night and is baking this morning, I made potato salad and we bought local fresh goat cheese we’ll be able to spread on our fresh baked sourdough rolls. Got everything ready to make a huge thing of soup tonight and we will thaw out the leftover bean spread we made last week.

It’s hard to believe we have been on this journey for 43 days now. Some days it weighs on us quite a bit, but some days it’s easy. But we have already gotten a glimpse of what going back would be and to tell you honestly, we have mixed feelings still. It was wonderful to have foods we hadn’t had in a while, but it left us feeling uneasy in our minds and bodies.

Although we had been honest with all about “cheating” while everyone was here, we spent the whole week-end feeling bad about buying things that weren’t in our range. Plus, after only two days of “normal foods”, our bodies were definitely feeling it: sluggish, bloated, slower… It’s been making us rethink our ways when we will be off the diet on Nov 19th for sure.