I woke up this morning having a food dream. Sean and I were in this old-fashioned restaurant and I was surreptitiously stuffing a pain au chocolate into my face, hoping the shopkeeper wouldn’t see me. Even though I was stealing, it was painful to wake up to reality.

The good news is that it’s just after noon on Wednesday, meaning we’re officially halfway to banana pancakes on Sunday morning! (Sean promised!) It’s difficult for me to look at the header picture right now. It’s the last thing I added to this blog post and now that I’m editing it I find myself severely distracted by it.

Humpday is truly something to celebrate, especially as I’m down to 57.9kg this morning so the closer I get to Sunday is a good thing. That’s a 2.1kg loss in only 3 days on a refugee diet. I was already feeling pretty lean before the challenge began, so the reduction feels significant. Energy-wise I’m feeling good at the moment but am noticing my mental state is fuzzy… I’m not as “with it” as I like to think I normally am. I know that once 8pm hits I’ll be in bed.

We’ve started to fry more food in oil, making little rice-lentil pancakes and yesterday’s fried sardines. I think that’s helping me to feel more sated. The key seems to be in keeping busy, including keeping movement up. I think I’d feel the drain a lot more if I was sedentary.  Exercise keeps things moving and has the positive effect of endorphins – which I’m not getting from chocolate these days.

Sean is keeping up his training regimen, doing yoga in the morning followed by sprints, and a surf. He’s definitely coping better than me, but he looks exhausted and we’re both sleeping an extra hour or more each night.

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Who knew rice-lentil-spinach cakes could be so good?!

It’s been interesting to do the challenge on another level as well. There are little perks like meal prep time is down, clean up after dinner is minimal, we never use the fridge (I don’t think it’s been opened all week), and waste is down in a very big way. There’s a box we fill up probably 3 times a week for recycling and take out the compost ~3 days in a week as well. Clearly we’ve done none of that for the duration of the challenge. We try to have a small footprint, but the challenge has been a good way to see what we can do to be better (buy in bulk, reduce plastic packaging even more, eat simply).

One added perk – a man just walked up to me and told me my aura is shining green and violet! The diet is definitely working!

That’s all for today. More tomorrow!

Donate to the Act for Peace Refugee Challenge here!