Debbie - Day 7: Memorial Day yard work

Today started out with coffee & soy milk, watermelon, blueberries, and whole wheat toast with peanut butter.  234 calories.

The morning was spent doing office work from home, but the afternoon and evening were dedicated to pulling out large quantities of bittersweet vine from our waterfront and off several trees and shrubs where it was well entrenched.  And other assorted yard and garden work.  At this writing I am beat, and there will be sore muscles in the morning.

Lunch was improvised from leftovers and what we had on hand, but was pretty nice.  We ate out on the deck and listened to the birds.

I have a goal of learning to identify at least 20 species of birds by their songs and calls this summer.  Today we saw and heard rose breasted grosbeak, yellow warbler, grey catbird, baltimore oriole, scarlet tanager, northern cardinal, belted kingfisher, and a few others.  What a perfect day it was.

Lunch: brown rice and black eyed peas curry; baked sweet potato with balsamic glaze; a small mesclun salad; sliced fresh fruits and veggies (avocado, mango, golden delicious apple, red bell pepper, celery, and baby carrot).  Served with red zinger (hibiscus) tea with lemon.  Dessert was a couple of Lindt dark chocolate squares.  378 calories.

Snack while kids were having their cheeseburgers in front of TV: a couple handfuls of tortilla chips. 142 calories.  Wow, they add up fast.  I prepared the cheeseburgers but did not taste anything that was off-limits.

After five hours of yard work, realizing we never went to get groceries, and figuring out who was going to get 12 year old from friends party at 9 PM, we finally just ordered out pizza.  I got a veggie pizza with no cheese and a spinach salad that had croutons.  Another two chocolate squares for dessert.  (Gotta get rid of those!)  The 15 year old actually had one of my no-cheese slices.  And so did Chris.

I felt a twinge of desire for the cheese pizza, but didn't have any.  Instead I had the very fluffy soft pita bread that came with the spinach salad.  Another 110 calories.

Total calories for the day, 1,414.  I estimate I did at least 400 calories worth of digging, pulling, hauling, and climbing.  I still feel like I am on target for gradually taking off a few pounds.

The first really challenging day for vegan eating -- while I prepared and watched others eat non-vegan food -- went quite well.  I'm happy with how I did.