Woke up with a horrendous headache this morning. Took a while for me to piece together what had caused it.
Short version: I’m not eating enough veggies and I need to figure out how to do that for another week as I still am stuck eating soft foods.
Longer version:
A week ago, I had dental surgery. I have only been having soft foods for the past week. This means no salad, which is a hardship, as I’m pretty addicted to salads.
As you may or may not know, I’ve modified my diet over the past few months. I’m still trying to average at least six cups of vegetables everyday. However, I’m no longer consistently ketogenic. There are days when I eat fewer carbs and I probably fall into ketosis. Other days, I don’t. I’m still eating paleo, so no grain, no soy, no dairy, no eggs, but lots of veggies and meat. I’m probably pretty consistently around 100-150 grams of carbs per day.
But right now, I need soft food. I can’t eat what I usually eat. I’ve tried to find other methods of continuing to eat veggies.
One of the ways I’ve been doing this is by stealing portions of my dear husband’s wonderful breakfast. He chops up every veggie in the house (generally between ten to twelve, most days) along with three to four different types of meat, then cooks that all down with spices. He makes a huge batch of that, then just warms it up for breakfast most days.
I’ve been taking his breakfast, adding some bone broth to it, then purifying it into a soup. It has some amount of vegetables, though not as much as I generally eat for breakfast. (When I could eat chewy food, I usually had three to four cups of vegetables every morning. His breakfast might contain a single cup. Still, better than nothing.)
I’ve also been trying to drink more green smoothies. However, I find it difficult to drink smoothies when it’s cold outside. When it’s warm, I don’t have any problem.
For the last week, I’ve been indulging myself in things like spaghetti with broken up hamburger and pasta. First, I put the pasta into a plastic bag. Then, I take a hammer to it and break it into tiny pieces. Then I overcook the pasta so it is gummable and I’m not really chewing it.
But that pasta is made out of red lentils, so not really paleo. Plus, it’s high carb.
I suspect that the serious amount of pain this morning was my body’s way of telling me that it doesn’t really like the change and would like more veggies on a regular basis.
One of the things I’m going to try doing is to make a larger batch of a smoothie, then dividing that up into smaller, more drinkable cups, instead of trying to drink all of a particular batch at the same time. This way I can get more greens in over the course of an entire day instead of trying to force down a huge amount of something cold in a single sitting.
I will also try to make more “soup”–start with bone broth, add veggies, blend and heat. Again, might do larger batches of those and portion them out.
I only have another week of eating soft food. My jaw is healing but I’m still slightly swollen, and I have a small amount of pain. But really, I don’t want another headache like I had this morning. It was too reminiscent of the bad old days when I would wake up feeling this awful on a regular basis. I wouldn’t write because I felt so awful, then I’d have to work in the afternoon by the time I did start feeling better, do publishing or client work.
Ugh. Never want to return to those days again. But if I’m not careful, if I don’t take care of myself, it wouldn’t take that long for me to drop back into those days.
I already knew that I’d committed to these changes for life. This morning was a good reminder of that.