I had a small epiphany last week, which led to the discovery of a possible (probable) answer to a 27 year-old mystery. It seems as though I can't eat dairy. Or, more specifically, milk protein. Which is added to a whole whack of other things, besides milk or regular dairy products. Fantastic.

Ah...tricky.

Not because I'm predisposed to gorging myself on cake products and fries. In fact, I'm not a fan of cake, generally, and I will never order fries as my side dish unless suffering from a hangover of substantial proportions, in which case nothing but fries will do. Generally, I make healthy food choices. However, when my routine is off by a millisecond or I'm going through any sort of change whatsoever, I'm far too easily tempted to make the wrong ones.

The holidays are a time of excess...excess food, excess drink, excess usage of credit cards, excess family, etc. With the lack of family (andthe current lack of plastic...bye bye credit cards), we only managed to keep the excess food holiday rules alive. We did OK...but I'm anxious to clean out the kitchen and stock it back up with healthy munchables. Unfortunately, this is pretty difficult to do in a place where everything is imported and everything imported is expensive. All fresh fruits and vegetables, of course, fall into this category. So, it becomes a budgeting issue...cut back on something else to afford the fresh stuff. Having lived my entire life in a country where it was never an issue to find an eggplant, and an eggplant rarely cost morethan $3 or $4 dollars, this is tough to get my head around. I'm still aghast that people pay $1 for an apple. AN apple. Like...one.

Since the word 'diet' seems to cause Kurt to go spontaneously deaf, we're just "changing" things. Again. Wholegrain everything. Delicious brown rice. No red meat...actually, very little meat at all. More fish. No processed sugar, except for the occasional square of dark chocolate. Soy this, tofu that...if I can sneak it in without him noticing. Very limited dairy...none at all if I can establish a reliable source for soy yogurt. And somehow, I have to find a way to fill in the gaps with more fresh fruit and veggies...while still finding a way to pay our electricity bill. The needle on the scale has definitely crept downwards since our arrival here, at least there is some motivation to keep going.

AND...handy diet tip...watching an episode of 'Ramsay's KitchenNightmares' during dinner is a great way to curb your appetite. Seeing what he scrapes out of those disgusting kitchens (with his bare hands,no less) has caused me to put down my fork more than once.

So...remainder of the summer stress pounds...be gone. I'm so over you. And so are my pants.