588 on the elliptical in 31 minutes this morning.  I’m sitting here dripping.

Woke up this morning with a headache, feeling like a hangover.  Oh no, not the dreaded delayed hangover syndrome.  I don’t think so.  Just low blood sugar, most likely.  I’m off to fix breakfast.  Fingers a bit sore for typing anyway.  I may OD on banjo plucking.  My initial assessment that it was easy still holds, but it isn’t easy if you want to play a tune the way it’s supposed to be played.  Just chording a long with a song is dead simple, even throwing in the occasional bass run.  But not playing Cripple Creek up to speed.  That’s going to take practice.   Go figure, eh.

Not much to report on today.  I should be more conscious of my water consumption.  I’m letting that slip.  But we’ve had nothing but program approved food all day.  Our standard soup for lunch on brown rice.   Ruth cooked a great stir fry again.

Maybe I should talk about our soup.  We have soup for lunch almost every day, but not an ordinary soup.  A really thick, nourishing soup.  It starts off as a crock pot full of water with a piece of lean beef or lean pork or chicken in it, plus garlic, lots of mushrooms, maybe onion, and that cooks until the meat is falling apart.  That’s the stock.  Then we add veggies, usually cabbage but often long beens.  We also add any leftovers from dinner, so the soup is always changing, and it’s usually at its best by the end of the week when we finish up the pot.  I keep expecting us to poison ourselves, but so far it’s just a great way to use up leftovers and make convenient lunches.  Before I went on this program I would usually have some mashed potatoes under my soup.  I’d make a huge batch of mashed potatoes for one of our dinners, and then use up the left over slowly in the soup.  It was always a question of timing to get the left overs used up before they went bad.  But now that we’re on the program I’m having my soup with pre-cooked brown rice.  That’s working out great.

Okay, back to the banjo.  I’ve only got twenty five minutes before ten o’clock, and I shut down all music then for fear of upsetting the neighbors.

So here are the first of the pictures.  On the left is the picture at the start, and on the right was taken Friday evening at the end of week 2.  It may not be much, but I can see a difference.  Not quite as much hanging over the belt.