Wednesday, December 22, 2010

vegan experiment = success!

Hello, blog, how are you doing? I'm sorry I've neglected you!

I was successfully a vegan for 6.5 days. It wasn't as hard as I thought, and it definitely nixed some fast food cravings in the bud.. "Hey, maybe I should stop at Dairy Queen for a blizzard! .. oh wait, that's dairy..".. and surprisingly, I didn't die. I've never really restricted my food intake in any way, and this was an interesting exercise in self-control that I was pretty sure I didn't actually possess.



Why 6.5 days instead of 7? We had an International Potluck at work last Friday (my Day Seven), and I was on the fence whether to go or not, but Thursday night I made up my mind to go and see what I could find. I whipped up a batch of hummus and cut up some fresh veggies, and sailed into the potluck hoping to find some vegan treats. At work this is the biggest social event of the year for us, and there was TONS of food!

There are a lot of different nationalities represented where I work, and some people are vegetarian for religious or personal beliefs. I found the people who brought dishes to be very accomodating of different diets. A lot of the dishes had little cards beside them stating the ingredients, and if they were vegetarian or not. I wound up with a plate of veggies, hummus, salad, and two different couscous dishes (one actually marked "vegan!"). I think there was some feta on the salad, but I left it to the side.

Then there was dessert.

Ohhh dessert.

I went in and did a round around the dessert table, and grabbed a coffee while I perused. There were DEFINITELY no vegan options, but there were some delicious looking sweets! I sat back down and chatted to the person I was sitting next to for a few minutes, and then decided to go for it. Christmas is only once a year!

I didn't overdo it, but one thing struck me - I didn't really enjoy dessert that much. I think I'm slowly getting more of a refined palate for sweets, and anything too sweet and sugary (milk chocolate, white chocolate, anything with icing or glaze) doesn't do it for me anymore.

That being said, yesterday at my office they put all of the chocolate within arm's reach of me. That's all I ate. All day. And BOY did I feel it by the time I was ready to go home. My brain was toast! I couldn't even look at FRUIT in my fridge at home! I definitely recognize that I have a tendency to snack when I'm bored, and that is my one big pitfall when it comes to this whole eating everything in moderation thing. WHOOPS there goes a whole package of cookies...

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