Day seventysix

I am trying to post every few days at this point. I will probably not post daily as I have in the past.

I am back from the trip to Cork, Ireland. I gained some weight on this trip. This morning I weighed 240.1. That's 2.3 pounds heavier than prior to the trip. The factors in that are probably:

1. I ate bread. They have marvelous bread in Ireland. Completely whole grain, but still. Not gluten free and very high in calories.
2. I was not completely strict on refined carbs. I ate a few desserts, which were not sugar free.
3. I may have gained some muscle. I have been doing a lot of yoga. More on this later.

On point 3, my clothes still fit the same, if not a bit looser. So it is true that I may have packed on some muscle. I have certainly been working hard. I have done Bikram yoga almost every day. I bought the book, and used an interesting technique to fit this in. Given that there are no Bikram studios in Cork, I had to do this in my hotel room. I proceeded to strip down, lock myself in the bathroom and stop up the gap at the bottom of the door with a towel. I then ran the shower on full hot until the tub was full. At this point the bathroom was very warm and steamy. I did the first 2 poses with the water running, and then shut it off. I finished the remaining poses with a full tub of extremely hot water in the room with me, with the door plugged up as I said. The result was that I sweated buckets, and got a killer workout every time I did this. And I never had to leave my hotel room to do so. Plus, since I did the whole thing in the buff, I did not generate any sweaty workout clothes. And for my final savasana, I simply got into the tub and soaked. Pretty cool, huh?

I do have some symptoms, though. I think the gluten is the main issue. My inflammation has kicked up, and I have a few IBS symptoms. I definitely need to tighten the diet back up.

I will be in California next week where eating strictly vegan is easier. I will let you know how this goes.

One interesting place I ate at in Cork was Cafe Paradiso, owned by Dennis Cotter. This is one of the finest vegetarian restaurants at which I have ever eaten. Outstanding! I ate there Thursday night, and I can still remember the details of this meal. For a starter I had a sample of vegetarian sushi. For my main course, I had pan fried tofu over a bed of braised bokchoy with a coconut milk-based Thai curry sauce. This came with a fried vegetarian wonton and udon noodles. For dessert (this is where the refined carbs came in), I had rhubarb crumble with gooseberry and soy ice cream. This was accompanied by a decaffeinated cappuccino with soy milk.


The EMC Cork folks who went out to dinner with me were kind enough to purchase for me Dennis Cotter's book, Paradiso Seasons, which I have begun to read. This is a very interesting book. I highly recommend it. It won the award for the best vegetarian book in the world in 2003, the year that it was first published. The following is a photo of me with the book while in the restaurant:



I will probably kick off a four day fast the week after I get back from this trip to recover the ground I lost in Cork. While I maintained the vegan nature of the diet (at least so far as I know, given the level of control I had), I did vary from the strict ETL guidelines, and that has caused me to lose some ground which I need to recover. I will let you know on that.

More later.