I’ve been reading the book Eat to Live and reading blogs that discuss the program. I like it because it is vegan. Most diet plans are pretty anti-vegetarian so this is a nice change. When I lost weight before I did it eating salads and veggie burgers. Eat to Live is sort of the same idea. You eat unlimited amounts of raw veggies in the form of salads and you eat 4-5 servings of fruit a day. You can have a limited amount of starchy vegetables and whole grains. No dairy.

The program starts with a 6 week challenge. You aren’t supposed to cheat for 6 weeks. Yeah, right. I can’t commit to no-diet-cheating for that long. So I decided to try for a week. Y’all are my accountability group. I’m going to record what I eat and hopefully knowing that I have to admit to everything will keep me on track.

I went grocery shopping today and of course knowing that I was limiting my diet choices made me want everything bad for me. It was torture walking through the bakery area. I’ve never bought anything in the bakery area except for bread but today everything looked soooooo good.

I’m using some recipes over at FatFree Vegan. There is an Eat to Live message board there too. From there I got the idea to chop my lettuce up really fine in order to make eating a salad more palatable. They also advocate blending everything up but I’m not quite ready for that.

My measure of success will be weight loss and the pants I wore today. They are a bit tight so we’ll see what they feel like next week.

For lunch (I came up with the idea after breakfast – oatmeal with almond milk, raisins, and a banana):

A mug of the white beans with tomato jam that I made yesterday
A salad (chopped up) topped with 2 cucumber slices and dressed with Apple Dressing.
Banana

The apple dressing is from the ETL book. It is 2 apples blended with 1/4 cup of orange juice and some lemon juice.

I was feeling good because I was able to fit more salad into my bowl with it all chopped up. The goal for green vegetable consumption per day is one pound. I kept right on feeling good until I looked at the container that the lettuce came out of. That big container that I have gotten 3 or 4 salads out of is 5 ounces. Blending everything up may be looking better and better.

Dinner

A blended up salad which did make it a bit easier to eat. I added grapes on top after the blending and that made it more appetizing.

Florentine Stuffed Mushrooms – I made 10 and divided them into two meals. They were ok but I think I’ll add some tomato sauce next time. I tend to like bolder flavors.

Black beans and salsa dip on celery, red pepper strips, and cucumbers