Chicken Skins

Chicken skin has never tasted so good. I don't even usually eat the skin off my chicken, but yesterday was my first day of introducing new foods back into my diet, and chicken was on the list. Man, did that crispy skin taste good. Gross, right? But when all you've eaten for a week is fish, sweet potatoes, carrots and pears, bone-in, skin-on, roasted-in-their-own-juice chicken thighs taste like heaven. So do grapes, which I was also able to eat yesterday, but somehow they don't quite compare to the roast chicken.

I ate both chicken and grapes with no apparent aggravation of symptoms or adverse reaction, so they're on the safe list. After today (assuming I don't start feeling terrible in the next few hours) so are green beans and broccoli. It's amazing how four simple ingredients make me feel so much more excited to have a meal.

I thought, since my diet has changed so drastically this last week (and will continue to look very different for a while) it would be interesting to see what, in the past, I've actually been EATING in a day. I went back through my food diary starting at the beginning of December, and nerded out on Excel after I got home from my doctor's appointment this afternoon.

This is based just on servings per day. So the 33% represents an average of 2.8 servings of grains in a day, and the 17% vegetables equals about an average of 1.4 servings of vegetables in a day. Far from the "five-a-day" we're always being told to get, huh? For comparison, here's a snazzy graphic showing you what you SHOULD be eating.
Cute, right? And I didn't even make a category for "foods containing fat and sugar." Point being, since last Friday, I've been eating about 75% fruits and vegetables, and 25% fish. Now I can have chicken, too. But I'm kind of amazed at how wild a shift that really is, compared to my usual eating habits. I mean, I LOVE carbs. And sugar, and fat. Because I've always been kind of scrawny, I've taken that as license to eat, entirely without guilt, giant meals at Bojangles, or huge servings of goopy desserts at restaurants, or like, 15 Christmas cookies in a sitting. Yeah, well, I'm just waiting for my karmic payback to be that all that flour and sugar has made my joints achey. We'll see. I had a dream last night that I ate pizza and pasta by accident and wrecked all my hard, self-denial-y work. Argh!! Rice is Sunday, milk is Tuesday, tea(!!) is Wednesday, butter is Thursday, and then next weekend I spend eating wheat three times a day for two days. I can't wait!!!!

Oh, and I still feel great, which is nice. Doc took some more blood today and is doing my liver enzymes again (they were a little elevated before) and my alkaline phosphatase (also related to liver/gallbladder), along with a few others, including an test they run to diagnose celiac disease, and a test for parvovirus - both of which I'm thinking are unlikely, but heck - I've got plenty of blood, so they can just go to town. My primary care guy warned me that rheumatologists are like vampires...they just want your blood.
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