Week Five - hotels and travel

During week five, I had a planned trip that would put me without any real ability to take/store food other than snacks. This meant that I needed to attempt to eat out at random restuarants and not deviate too far from the expected additions of week 5. What that ended up looking like was a bit different than I had hoped, but seems to be working out so far. Before going on travel, with the expectation that I may not be able to find a meal made of my added foods to date, I made a list of all of the "mostly blessed" foods by correlating the LEAP plans list of similar foods. This expanded the list of potential options greatly, but it also meant that if something did not sit well, it would be harder to figure out what the cuprit was in a meal consisting of many "new" foods.

The completely expanded list of foods can be found down below, along with the tested food that goes with them. It still prevents pretty much any sort of dessert available in a restuarant, but it has allowed me to find something mostly safe to eat as a primary meal at every sit-down sort of place I have visited. Breakfast on the other hand was a bit more difficult. The hotel I was in did not have plain eggs, all yogurts were sweetened (which I avoided even before starting this diet), and everything else was made of bread. The only viable option was oatmeal. There was no available ingredient list, so I hoped for the best. There were also no toppings, but I managed to dig out a honey packet from the jelly pile near the toaster, giving it at least a little flavor. Lesson learned... the rest of the days breakfast out was in order. Even through trying a few different places, I was universally able to find either plain eggs, or omlet options with allowed foods. Since egg dishes were really the only available options, I was pretty over eggs by the end of the week, but it far surpassed plain hotel oatmeal!

As far as snacks, I packed a head of time. I had some cheddar popcorn popped in coconut oil, some pre-packaged banana/coconut snack bites, Fritos®, and a snack mix of almonds, coconut slices, raisins, and a few pistachios. They all managed to travel pretty well, and stored well throughout the trip.

The weekend back home gave me a chance to eat some more basic meals, but the following week is planned to be travel again. Speaking of travel... Due to the number of trips (camping, then hotel travel, different time zones), it is a bit hard to tell how well this diet is assisting fatigue. I will say that despite the crazier than usual schedule, I have been mostly functional in the mornings, so perhaps that means it is helping.

Going forward, since I will be sticking with a relatively static food list for a couple of months, I will move the blog topics to a little blurb about how it is affecting fatigue levels, and will start adding in some info on whatever interesting topic I get sucked into that week.

The list of foods I get to stick with for the next couple of months is below.