Be well now.

Day 4

Breakfast – banana, granola

Lunch – Lazy Day Peanut Noodle Salad minus the peanut butter sauce

Dinner – blueberry muffin, coffee

I made the noodle salad twice before and prefer the dish with a little rice vinegar on top instead of the heavier peanut butter sauce. At dinner time, I was in route to  D.C. with one of my girlfriends and feeling somewhat cloudy due to an unrelenting allergy attack that I mistook for a head cold days earlier. I was surprised at how much better I felt after eating the sugary, buttery, floury muffin. I wonder if I could be allergic to a new food in my diet. I was told recently that sometimes whole grains can lower your blood pressure too much – which could explain the cloudiness and lack of energy I have been experiencing. After just one week, it’s too early to tell.

Day 5

Breakfast –  ½ Asiago egg sandwich, ½ whole grain egg sandwich

Lunch – ½ tuna salad sandwich with lettuce, tomato, ½ portobello sandwich with raspberry vinaigrette coleslaw

Dinner – Bul-gogi, (beef strips marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, green onion, garlic and sugar) various pickled vegetables, bean paste soup with tofu, cold kim chi soup and Taegi gogi, (pork marinated bean paste and green onion and garlic).

On the road, breakfast was at Panera Bread where I ate lots of cheese. I love cheese. My friend and I ate a delicious lunch at a charmingly tiny restaurant in Occoquan, Va., called the Blue Arbor Café. Dinner was at the Korean Garden restaurant in Richmond, Va.

Day 6

Breakfast – fried (with butter) egg, brown rice

Lunch – seed crackers, Barley Lentil Soup

Dinner – crispy noodle shrimp, fried oysters, butternut squash soup, a bit of flounder

I had dinner at Mezzanine, a Carytown restaurant in Richmond, Va. – named Restaurant of the Year by Style Weekly. They buy locally so the menu changes often.

Day 7

Breakfast – granola, banana

Lunch –  brown rice, hummus, seed crackers

Dinner – bean soup, kim chi

All the new foods I added to my diet were tasty and filling. I will continue with whole grain eating for a few more weeks and then stop for about a week to see how I feel. One week is too soon to tell if I am having an allergic reaction to anything new. I still feel pretty crappy today, but my nose is no longer running like a faucet and my sinus cavity no longer feels like I snorted wasabi.

For me so far, the greatest lesson of macrobiotic eating is conscious chewing. I can not argue with what proper chewing can do for digestion. With time, I’m sure to discover more benefits. Future comments on macrobiotic living will post here.