Phase II, Day 14

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Breakfast: 1/2 ww bagel with almond butter/flax meal spread

Lunch: leftover chili mixed with 1 T hemp oil

Dinner: a couple of slices of ancient grain bread; big bowl of lentil stew

Exercise: none

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I spoke too soon on that cold. I spent all of today snuffly and a little headachy, and figured it wasn't a good idea to try to do any exercise.

So tomorrow I weigh and measure again. For the full four weeks of this diet, my calorie calculations predict that I should have lost 5.5 to 6 pounds so far, from my starting weight of 134 pounds. That means the scale should read 128 tomorrow, give or take a pound for measurement error/water weight.

One thing I should point out is that I don't think anyone else doing this diet as a vegan (or not as a vegan, for that matter) needs to worry about counting calories as I have been doing. I've been doing so myself only because I wanted to test out this diet in a systematic and objective way. I think if you eat "on plan" (namely, avoiding all refined carbohydrates and being a little judicious with things like whole grain breads/pastas and fruits), don't eat past satisfying your hunger, and (at least early in the diet) make sure that you are eating often enough to avoid dips in blood sugar, you shouldn't need to keep track of calories at all. You'll eat about 1200 or so calories a day, without having to worry about exact measurements. (Some people, especially heavier people or men, will eat more, because they will have bigger appetites to match their larger bodyweights/muscle mass, but you get the idea.) In fact, the SBD diet book explicitly states that you should not have to count calories, and I agree with that.