Day Twenty-Two: Fear Factor

Dinner: leftover whole wheat angel hair, salmon with lemon pepper seasoning, and a last-minute salad of cucumber, cherub tomatoes, and red and yellow bell pepper with balsamic dressing. Lizard not included.

New addition to the diet plan this week: yogurt. Three times a day yogurt?!?!? This is more yogurt than I've had, like, ever in my entire life. Trepidation! I just never liked it, not sure if it's a texture, taste or aftertaste kind of thing. But last night I bought some drinkable yogurts and some yoplait Very Vanillas. Now, I've seen people eat yogurt just out of the container or add granola, fruit, honey, etc. But I've never eaten it myself in anyway so was unsure how I should or want to eat yogurt. FYI: Drinkable yogurt was survivable. Very Vanilla went OK with Grape-Nuts but ... will seek other options. And once again I'm realizing something through the PCP. A big barrier in my experience with food is that ... I just don't know how. How to prepare it. How to buy it. How to eat it.

My neighbor Laura brought it up recently, recalling a funny summer memory from last year when her family had ribs for dinner and I sat there curiously looking at it; I asked her how to eat it properly, and she laughed and laughed. It's true: never had a rib before that. Did the same thing a few years ago when I visited a friend of mine in Los Angeles and we went to a sushi restaurant (another first time). I realized people use chopsticks, sure, but were forks or fingers were considered taboo or acceptable? I grew up in a family that had limited budgetary means that matched their taste buds. My mom thought Heinz canned spaghetti sauce was "too spicy" for her liking, so once I was on my own I made some progress, but apparently not enough.

PCP is having me to eat things I wouldn't normally. To stick with PCP, I'm must seek out diverse foods within these food groups (carb, protein, veg, fruit, cheese/yogurt). I don't want to eat a bushel of apples or pineapple for every fruit snack. I like salmon, which means I cannot eat it for every protein portion if I want to continue to like salmon. So now I have a fruit basket in my house! How Rockwellian! I'm learning that certain things like bananas and avocados are better ripe and what that looks like (ohhhhhhhh, see??? this might have contributed to my earlier dislike for produce! Eureeka!) and that certain combinations of food are complimentary. This week alone, I've eaten 1. dates 2. raspberries 3. my own homemade guacamole 4. yogurt 5. filet mignon grilled by me 6. rice cooker rice.

On another note, the exercise seems to be ramping up at a pace to where I'm starting to feel a little intimidated. I think it's the number (1,000+ jump ropes? what comes after? where does it stop?) and the fact I've hit an exercise (the pull-up) that I cannot do, period, and that doing a pull-up, let alone a whole set, might take some time to even achieve if I ever do. Once, after wimping out on a tough exercise, I had a roller derby girl named Venom tell me "C'mon ... You can do anything for 20 seconds!"And ... she was right. That's nothing! And it's my mantra now when I exercise. I can do this set of 15, right? I can jump 10 times 10 times in a row, right? I can attempt one pull-up, right? And I have >70 more days to try.