Day 44 – Big Buffet Cheat

Meat for the Mind? – Experimenting with the Carnivore Diet for Mental Health

Friday, October 4th, 2019

*** If you would like to read about my rationale for starting this diet, my first post about this is available here.

• Sleep: About 7.5 hours. A bit restless. No memory of dreams.

• Food consumed:  12:15 PM: Coffee with theanine, cultured butter and a splash of vanilla extract.
  
  6:00 PM: A buffet. Buck-wild. Carbs galore.
  
  We went to a buffet to celebrate Jared’s granny’s birthday. I decided to try out foods other than meat (as the meat selection was rather lacking. I was curious to see how my body would react to eating as many carbs as I wanted.
  
  Jared was amazingly good and stuck to his diet, only eating slices of beef roast, a small coffee and some whipped butter. As the beef was likely not grass-fed and of poorer quality than we’ve become accustomed to, he also had a bit of horseradish. He said that none of the rest of it was tempting at all. It was just the social aspect of eating like everyone else that he was missing.
  
  I, however, decided to try a bunch of different things and was surprised to find major changes in my tastes. I didn’t bother tracking my foods since there was too much variety to list. Small quantities of each item added up to quite a volume of food – salad, beets, scalloped potatoes, a few rigatoni and tortellini noodles with pesto and meat sauce, a couple of mussels, some teriyaki pork, calamari, melon, a tiny bit of apple crisp, flan, raspberry sorbet, butterscotch ice cream, etc. I avoided the breads and cakes.
  
  Despite having given myself permission to go fairly wild on the buffet, it was the most cautious I’ve ever been at a buffet. I filled my plate about 3 or 4 times (usually it would be 5 or 6) and didn’t ever finish a full plate because of the items I didn’t like. Just about everything seemed to have sugar and wheat in it. I could feel my belly start to bloat almost immediately. The teriyaki pork was basically very thin, stringy noodles of pork, covered by double their volume of batter, in a sticky sauce. The calamari was good for the first few bites but the flour-based batter had a soggy, filler kind of texture. A meat sauce tasted like wet sawdust. To my surprise, the apple crumble tasted gross – it was weirdly gooey, far too sweet and somehow tasted a bit like chlorine. A tiny bite of ‘red velvet’ cake just tasted like baking soda and sugar and I wanted to spit it out again.
  
  I had taken a scoop full of what I thought was whipped cream from the dessert table but it definitely wasn’t cream. Probably Cool-Whip. It was inedible – literally did not taste like food. It reminded me of bathroom sealant. I picked up a pumpkin tart and scraped off the dollop of Cool-Whip. The crust didn’t taste good at all so I picked it off until I was left only with a small handful of filling. Even the filling tasted plastic and artificial so I was left with a plate of completely disintegrated tart.
  
  The items I most enjoyed were the melon (cantaloupe and honeydew), a piece of banana dipped in melted chocolate (though the chocolate was too sweet and did not solidify as I would have expected), some pieces of cucumber, and the pesto sauce on a few pasta noodles. I had tried this buffet before and, though it was never my favourite, I’d enjoyed it well enough in the past.
  
  It was definitely an interesting experiment. I’d forgotten what a bloated feeling it is to be full on carbs. After the meal, I felt like lying down on the cool sidewalk and rolling home. Jared and I stopped for an oolong milk tea on the walk home and it helped.
  
  Strangely, when I got home, although I was stuffed, I still wanted toast. I resisted.
  
  I plan to fast until 2 PM tomorrow.

• Mood:  Decent. A little obsessive in the evening as I was drawing and couldn’t seem to get the fine details right, which was frustrating.

• Energy levels / physical feelings: My energy levels were fairly good. I did 10 sets of 12 therapy-burpees on a 1 minute-timer per set and 10 minutes of timed ab exercises. They were exhausting but made me clear-headed afterwards, as they usually do. However, I felt a bit wobbly and light-headed on the eighth set of burpees and kind of stumbled. I also noticed I couldn’t feel my toes half way through the burpees. I took a picture as my toes were white and blue by the end of them.

• Poop?: Tiny turd at 11:30 AM. Very large turd at 1:00 PM. I must mention that since drastically reducing dairy, my poops have ceased to be painful.