This is Day Seven of Thirty, and life has become one big chewing exercise.
The food allowed by this Whole Thirty diet is grotesquely inefficient. It requires so much chewing for so few calories! I neglected to get an accurate weight measurement before this diet started, but today I did and I came up five pounds short. I attribute these missing pounds to having to chew so much. The chewing of all this wholesome food is burning more calories than I can afford.
Take olives, for example. My goodly wife suggested offhand that I eat a can of them. Do you know how difficult it is to eat an entire can of olives? The law of diminishing returns kicks in like nobody’s business! The first quarter or so of the can is enjoyable. The next quarter is okay, but lacks that certain je ne sais quoi. Following that it becomes apparent that you’re actually consuming pencil erasers or octopus eyeballs or something like that. What I mean to say is, the thing loses its appeal, it becomes a mere monotonous exercise in chewing. And yet the chewing has only begun! After all, a can of olives is a mere drop in the bucket of a man accustomed to eating four or five 6-inch pancakes of a morning.
Green beans are another example. These things take forty bajillion bites and half an eternity to chew. And for what? A few calories, probably barely enough to make the whole exercise worthwhile. Or take hamburger patties. Chewing a hamburger patty by itself requires more or less the same amount of effort as chewing it with a bun, cheese, and all the fixings–the hamburger itself is the limiting factor, and everything else comes along for free. But when you’re not allowed to have cheese and a bun and all the fixings, this chewing action becomes inefficient. This Whole Thirty diet might fix my gut, but I’ll need a new set of chompers by the end of it.
In other news, the viral blight which afflicted the camp chef has been spreading. Your correspondent succumbed to the thing last night, and the ache continues to make itself known, blending in beautifully with the (likely permanent) dull ache in my stomach. At least it’s not the vomiting kind of blight. I think at this point if I contracted a vomiting kind of blight I’d probably just die. The sheer effort of vomiting (burning those calories again!), combined with the effrontery of carelessly discarding all that food I worked so hard to ingest, would break my spirit at last.
As Day Seven draws to a close, morale is poor, but we are driven on by iron wills. Any pusillanimous talk of turning tail and fleeing before the enemy has been shouted down, and so the expedition continues.