Add The Damned Stevia . . .

It’s the middle of Day 3 on the I-Burn.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might want to catch up HERE.

Yesterday, I learned the value of dilution.

(No, you didn’t miss a blog post – I was too busy to write. Read on…)

As I have complained about before, you’re required on this eating plan to drink 1/2 of your body weight, in water, every day.

Honestly, did our caveperson forebears drink like this? I think not.

Every single diet plan on God’s green Earth seems to want you to drink gallons of water. Frankly, I don’t get it. We can’t be “built” to drink this much water.

I guess the idea here is that we’re also not built to be drinking wine, and eating Twinkies and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

As such, we have to dilute the toxins we shove in our mouths with as much water as possible. So, our caveperson forebears would drink like normal people, because they were eating the way we’re s’posed to be eating. We have to drink like camels, because we eat and drink stuff our body doesn’t know what to do with, and this is the only way to get rid of it.

Doesn’t mean I have to like it . . .

But back to dilution.

Day 1, I didn’t quite make it through all the water I was supposed to drink. As such, on Day 2, I figured I’d add it to the smoothie and the tea.

Genius!

This made the smoothie far more palatable – though it does mean that you now have basically a pitcher of smoothie v. a cup. (All the ingredients wouldn’t fit in even the largest cup of my smoothie maker anyway, so this just turns what was about 1-1/2 large smoothie-maker cups into a pitcher.)

This also makes the tea a bit more palatable. Yay!

Yesterday, I also learned the value of stirring.

If you read my Day 1 rant, you’ll know that the “tea” is really basically lemon oil. Well . . . what do they say about oil and water?

Duh!

Oil floats on water.

So the tea that I drank on Day 1 (especially Morning 1, Day 1) came right off the top of the pitcher in my fridge. As such, I think that it was basically all lemon oil. On Day 2, when it seemed like I was “getting used to” the tea, I actually had a lightbulb moment and realized that it was just that there was less and less of the oil in it.

Stir the Damned Tea before you Drink It.

Lesson learned.

Today, I learned the value of stevia.

You’re allowed to “sweeten” the tea and the smoothie – I just didn’t think that it would do that much good. This morning, I decided “What the heck, I gotta do something here,” and added stevia to the smoothie.

The smoothie is made up of raw cranberries, raw limes, blueberries, kale, walnuts, avocado, and cucumber. Sour-acid-nasty.

Add stevia? It kinda tastes like a cran-lime margarita.

I don’t know why I didn’t do this immediately upon tasting the cran-lime battery acid on Day 1. Probably because, in the book, she says “Well, if you really want to, hey, you could add a bit of stevia…” – so I didn’t think it would make that much of a difference. Duh!

What does this mean?

I had my pitcher of smoothie today and didn’t hate it.

Ok – I actually liked it. WHAT? Yeah, it wasn’t bad. Sure, there was a good load of stevia in there, but it’s straight stevia leaf, which is allowed. My lord, why didn’t I figure this out before the final day?

As an added bonus, of course, I’ve drunk a big lot of the water I’m supposed to be drinking, because I diluted things, as learned on Day 2.

ass soup in the pitcher

I have a TON of the soup left.

Pomroy says in the book that the recipe makes a lot of soup – and it does. I actually fed some to my hubby last night, and he said that it was pretty good. (Granted I did drizzle his with truffle oil.) I drank more of it yesterday than I did on Day 1, because I was a lot hungrier than on Day 1, and the soup is a “free” food.

Of course, it’s a free food made up of a ton of root veggies, which make me, as they say in England, “windy.” Not smelly, just windy. (TMI?) I actually looked up the ins and outs of loud, soft, smelly, not smelly on Google – it’s fascinating (generally has to do with fermenting carbohydrates) – but I’ll let you do that research yourself ;-)

Tonight we have to meet with someone, and that means we are likely to go out to dinner after. I guess I will do my best – probably meaning just get veggies. And then, we’re done! Not quite sure what we’re moving to on Monday – my guess will be the Pomroy Fast Metabolism Diet. I did have some success on that one before, I just got bored and quit.

So, any changes, as I’m in the middle of Day 3?

*My daughter has found her rings are really spinning on her fingers (a sign that inflammation is down)

*I haven’t lost any scale weight. I know, I know, you’re supposed to stay off it for the 3 days, but the dang machine is there staring me in the face. On the plus side (I did NOT say “plus size”…), my daughter has lost 3.5 pounds and my son-in-law 4, and they’re dutifully drinking all their water, so I tend to think it’s not “just water weight.”
*My rosacea is non-existent. That doesn’t surprise me, of course, as I actually know that it’s a by-product of inflammation. But it’s quite nice to have white skin and not red blotches on my face.
*I’m really hungry. You’re supposed to eat “as much” of the soup, tea (!!), celery, cucumbers, jicama, limes or lemons as you want. The thing is – that these are basically just water. And they sit in my stomach like water. I feel bloated, and not “sated.” So – I’m hungry.