I decided to start eating grains again yesterday because I’m going skiing next week, and I’ll probably eat some grains then, and if reintroducing grains weirded my stomach I’d rather that happen here than there.

Plus, 3 days of eating-grains-again data would be nice to have.  It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got.

Anecdotal findings so far:
- not eating grains makes me feel rather healthy.
- not eating anything with added sugar would make me feel rather healthier.  I went with “well I’ll try to minimize sugar” which ended up being a pretty ineffective way to minimize sugar.
- grains make me feel a little fuller.  (not in a good way.)
- a bit of the difficulty in making the switch is “what’s the base of your meal?”  Replacing grains with spinach worked for a couple dishes.  Sometimes I’d eat fruit and/or nuts.  I’m trying to just stop worrying about having a staple that soaks up all the rest of the sauce.
- eating no grains is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating no grains is easy when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day.
- eating “minimal added sugar” is easy when you cook your own food.
- eating “minimal added sugar” is hard when you have a bountiful buffet of wonderful food available for you every day.  Dessert is tempting (especially when it’s interesting, ice cream, or italian).
- eating no grains is hard when you go out to eat.  At some restaurants, you cannot eat!  At most restaurants, you just have to be comfortable looking a little ridiculous.  I ate Indian with no rice.  It was good anyway.
- eating minimal added sugar is easy when you go out to eat.
- I feel better after eating healthier.  If I could just internalize that thought, and not divorce the immediate good taste from the 15-minutes-later heavy feeling, eating junk food would never be appealing.  Hmm.
- There was a specific warning in “the 4 hour body” about how thai curry without rice might give you gas.  Truth!  I wonder why.
- smashed frozen bananas + other smashed fruit (or peanut butter) is almost just straight up ice cream.  Seriously.  It’d probably be even better in a food processor.

’s all for now.  More real findings after data happens.  First, anyone know stats?  Here are two analyses I’m thinking of doing:
- if each day had a “mood rating” or like my average mood for the day, track that in the 7 days before vs the 21 days of the study.  (like a T test or something?  Null hypothesis: mood before = mood after, uhh non-null hypothesis: mood after > mood before)
- see if there are correlations between mood and energy, stomach and energy, or stomach and mood (I guess run a linear regression?)
- and maybe rope sleep into this too; we’ll see.
If I sound totally off base on any of these, do tell.