\jeff{krimmel}

My Summary of Lent

Lent is over (today being Easter Sunday), and I successfully completed my six and a half weeks of meatless dieting. I did eat seafood, however, and I would guess I did so about twice a week. Ariele and I were able to find a handful of vegeterian recipes that really turned out great, though. Specifically, we made vegeterian curry, garden chili, home-made pizza, tofu kabobs, and black bean burritos that all turned out great. I am positive each of those will show up again for dinner throughout the year.

I think that the ideal diet for me is somewhere between my pre-Lent diet and the diet I had over Lent. I ate a lot more dessert after dinner during Lent trying to fill myself up. One night I polished off a whole bag of Chewy Chips Ahoy (a several thousand calorie dessert), and I just finished a bag of Oreo cookies over two nights this past week. That stuff isn’t very healthy, so I hope adding some meat back to my diet will stave off some of those hunger pains. I hope to average one meatless meal per day between lunch and dinner over the course of the week, and I also hope to limit myself to one meal with red meat per week.

I got back into the meat-eating routine tonight with a trip to Fuddrucker’s with Ariele, Mike, Bert, Saucy, and Adam. I ordered the half-pound original Fudd burger with a regular order of chili cheese fries. Delicious. The first bite of that hamburger…exactly what I had hoped for. I guess I’m not cut out to be a strict vegeterian at this point, though I did mentioned over Lent that if it was a case of being the doctor’s order, my Lenten diet would have been sustainable. I didn’t have any true cravings for meat, and the past couple of days have only been tough because I knew I was going to be having meat of some form on Sunday. If meat was out of the question entirely, it really would not have been that big of a deal.

Anyway, the change in diet was quite an experience, and I’m already a little curious what I will do for Lent next year. Maybe the no meat routine will become a Lenten staple, or maybe I will do something slightly less drastic next year. Who knows. Anyway, I’m just going to concentrate on trying to construct a healthy diet for myself and see where that takes me.