A Summer Salad

Yesterday the farm shop were selling some gorgeous, organic, freshly dug lettuce with the most beautiful full and juicy leaves. I couldn't resist and bought two - one green, and one maroon-purple.

I tore up half the green one yesterday and washed the leaves and mixed them with baby spinach and piled the whole lot into a large tupperware. A LOT of greenery. The mixture was delicious, but on my third trip to the container I decided it needed something more. So I added a whole bunch of fresh mint leaves from the garden, and lots of lemon juice. Yum.

Today I repeated the process but this time I added crushed dried chillis to my second (or it might have been third) helping. And that was delicious too.

Reading April's post about people's varying tastes for food and quantity, I guess I am in the MR camp. I like my food to have volume most of the time. I really don't like the possibility of feeling hungry, and I am so grumpy when I am. I guard against it when I can.

But still I need to be careful. I thought my salad was enormous yesterday, and it was - I had also added various other veggies to it, and because I was insomniac in the night I had eaten some cereal so had started my day on over 200 calories anyway. I hadn't added it all into CoM at that point because I was logged into my work account, but when I got to doing that at the end of the day, before dinner, I found I was still low in calories, or lower than I thought - I was thinking I was almost at my day's "limit".

Which in a way was good because it meant I had room to grill a wholewheat pitta, tear it up, and make a kind of fattoush with it and the spinach and leaves and mint and lemon and some flax oil. Considering I rarely eat bread-y things any more, that was a real treat. And I had a pile of broccoli and zucchini. And I still ended my day just under 1200 cals.

But in another way it's bad because volume is deceptive. I think I am eating a lot, and I am not. I'm very much aware that I am at the point now where I shouldn't be losing any more weight, but I am finding it quite difficult to add in those tiny amounts of more calorific foods into my diet that would stop the loss (not that it's dropping off at any speed). Quite irritating, because I thought I'd knocked that particular mental quirk on the head years back.

One way around this would be to allow myself to eat more normally socially. Go back to the piece of bread before dinner, and the cheese in small quantities. But it's a cheat, and probably contradictory to the mechanisms of CR. But then not eating enough is also contradictory to the mechanisms of CR.

And I really don't feel as though I can deal with the six-inch-high salad plate!

So I guess I need to fight the fat-phobe in me, because that is where my calorie deficit is. Eat more nuts. Some avocado. Put a little more olive oil on my salad. Add another teaspoon of flax to my hot veggies. What else can I do? :-)

I just don't want to lose any more; I am fine and happy and healthy right here and now.

Except that I have just sunburnt my shoulders in a major way, eating my salad in the courtyard. Ow!