A weekend of celebration

Three days on the road, new passport and my birthday celebration. What an experience to go out in the world if you are following a nutritional plan.

Eating in Germany has always been a big challenge for me. They do know how to make dark, heavy, wholesome bread and bakeries abound, that's fine. The problem for a PCPer is that meals here consist of lots of cheese, meat with thick salty sauces, oily roasted potatoes and, for my taste, overcooked vegetables. There's oil dropping from every Wurst and the Pretzels taste better with lots of butter. There is fast food everywhere. The positive side is that you can find fruit and great yogurt easily, but when it's raining and dark you don't want to have a yogurt picnic.

I went to restaurants and asked for some simple meat and salad, sushi or had a nice thai salad and fish. It worked to some extent but you can't control the amount of salt or oil they put in dressings or sauces.

After a month of PCP nutrition everything at restaurants tastes extremely salty. I also found that sauces are not necessary in some recipes, they aren't good enough on their own and they just hide the food's pure taste.

I wish there were places where you could eat really simple meals, with drops of lemon or chopped herbs. A real minimalist preparation of food.

There was no jumping these days. My knee is just beginning to recover and anyway I spent the whole day walking all around Frankfurt. On Friday I was very undisciplined: no exercises and a glass of wine to celebrate my birthday. Oh, and I also drank some beer...cold and delicious.

And finally I had my indulgence. I was trying too hard to find a good chocolate cake and of course I didn't. But on Saturday we passed by a french bakery and they had the most amazing pastries and pains au chocolat so I chose this fantastic blackberry tart and.....I was happy.

It wasn't very sweet and the blackberries were juicy. Delicious. Afterwards I began to feel some pressure in my forehead but not the usual headache I get after eating sugar.

This experience of eating in restaurants showed me something similar to what Erik reports in his last post. There's a big difference between eating lots of PCP food and never feeling indigested or dizzy and eating even less food from restaurants and immediately feeling heavy and sleepy. 

Back to discipline!