First Day Off Report

I guess yesterday was kind of a day off because I indulged by eating out twice. There's basically no way to get an accurate estimate of what I ate because neither restaurant puts their nutrition data online. I'm positive I went over my guidelines, if not for lunch then definitely for dinner. I didn't want to take a day off so early in the program, but it was a special day.

My friends in my program went out to lunch at Cuban Revolution in the American Tobacco District - I spent about $9 and had a "Cuban Salad." I didn't look too bad for me - Romaine lettuce, black beans, little bit of cheese, onions, few maduros. I didn't put dressing on it because it was quite tasty on its own. But it was quite a giant salad and I ate nearly all of it.

I took Kyle out to dinner at Blu for his birthday. It's a pretty nice seafood restaurant in downtown Durham, and I recommend it. The food was absolutely delicious - I felt like Kyle and I were both food critics (in a good way) because we were dissecting the meals into their various wonderful tastes and discussing them. I had shrimp and grits (picture at right from here), because that seems like a southern thing and I'd never tried it anywhere else - it was divine! Aside from the shrimp and grits and a butter sauce the dish had asparagus, mushrooms, and applewood bacon. Luckily the dish was not in enormous American proportions so I was full but not stuffed after eating all of it. I also had a crabcake (Kyle and I split the appetizer) and three bites of Kyle's dish, mostly scallops. The meal would have beeen about $55 or $60 but I had a $25 gift certificate from Restaurant.com that I paid $2 for, so we ended up paying only $35 total! That's the way to eat out at nice places when you can't really afford it, I suppose, though the one meal was still nearly half of my eating-out budget for the month. I jokingly told Kyle that he's going to be underwriting some of my meals out for the rest of the month and he said no way - you better hope you have a birthday this month! Which I do. :)

After dinner we walked down 9th Street to Francesca's where Kyle ordered some gelato and a cannoli. I had one-and-a-half bites of the gelato and one bite of cannoli. Later in the evening, I ate four mint Oreos - my one real cheat so far, because I just wanted them for the taste.

As far as food groups go, I had almost zero fruit (only the maduros, and I'm not 100% sure they are fruit) and probably very little dairy (bit of cheese on the salad, whatever it took to make the grits and the sauce, and the tiny bit of gelato). I think my only vegetables for the day were the lettuce in the salad and the asparagus on my shrimp and grits, so definitely not enough there. Good bit of meat and grains, but I bet a lot of the calories came from the not-in-a-food-group stuff like the butter sauce and dessert.