Day Three & Four: This diet's bugging me!

OK, so I’m feeling far less interesting today then I have while writing my previous blogs. Perhaps it’s due to this feeling of exhaustion. Can’t blame the diet though – most likely it is related to my driving all night on Friday. My sleep schedule hasn’t been right since. This morning Zombie had to wake me up because I was sleeping through my alarm. I had incorporated the sound of the alarm into a dream: I was annoyed in my dream because someone wouldn’t answer their cell phone – turns out that someone was me, since I use my cell phone as an alarm.

My sister decided to join me on my vegan diet as of yesterday. I cooked her more scrambled tofu, this time with garden-fresh tomatoes, squash, and peppers along with the same spices I used on day two of the diet. I was worried that the tofu wouldn’t be flavorful enough so towards the end of cooking I doctored it up with some extra spices. It was a rainy morning and we were surrounded by five wet dogs, which was delightful. Cynthia complained that one of them smelled like an armpit. I got insecure and worried, maybe it wasn’t the dogs – maybe I smelled like an armpit. It turned out that the smell was coming from my tofu – one of the additional spices I used on this occasion was turmeric. The aroma was pungent but the tofu was delicious, definitely better than the version I prepared on Saturday.

I stopped at Trader Joe’s on the way back to PA to pick a couple things up to make lunch on Monday and found some delightful looking dark-chocolate-covered cherries that I threw into the basket since all of the ingredients on the label appeared to be vegan. Of course, when I got home I couldn’t find them on the Trader Joe’s list of vegan foods (they were on the list of vegetarian foods though) which made me wonder…are vegan foods not considered vegan if they are processed in a factory that also manufactures products containing dairy (as was noted on the label)? Why is it that Yves soy crumbles “may contain egg” yet they label the product as vegan, but foods that are “made on equipment shared with wheat, dairy, peanuts, and nuts” not considered vegan? At first I thought this was just a labeling issue (which apparently is a big deal in the vegan world, http://www.vegansoapbox.com/vegan-labels/ ) but then I learned that “confectioner’s glaze” is not vegetarian because it contains bugs (shellac http://www.vegansociety.com/resources/animals/shellac.aspx ).

Cynthia texted me today, worried that she messed up her diet because there was a hidden animal product (not sure if it was dairy or egg) in the bread she purchased. I told her not to worry – maybe it’s not fair to expect that we’ll just figure out how to eat vegan overnight. Perhaps the best way to describe what we’re doing is using the six weeks to learn how to eat vegan. I’m sure we’ll hit some more bumps in the road.

Sunday’s Menu (1,291 calories):

Breakfast: Scrambled armpit tofu, Black coffee (decaf)

Snack: Tortilla chips

Dinner: Soy Latte, Hummus and Veggie Wrap, Dark Chocolate-Covered Cherries

Vitamins: Women’s One Multivitamin, Sublingual B12

Monday’s Menu (1,513 calories):

Breakfast: Banana w/peanut butter, 24 ounces of decaffeinated, black coffee

Snack: Thai Chili-Lime Cashews

Lunch: Pita with hummus, Kalamata olives, tomatoes, bean sprouts

Snack: Dark Chocolate-Covered Cherries

Dinner: Cynthia’s delicious vegan chili (Thanks doo!)

Vitamins: Sublingual B12

Alrighty...Time for this bug-eating, vegan wanna-be to catch up on some Z's!