the joys of a major diet change

So literally the second I started this new food switch my body purged itself of...everything. I knew this would happen because every time I go vegan the lack of shit in my body makes my system go nuts. It might be a product of me feeling a little under the weather as well, but either way, it was a serious cleanse.

I still am cheating slightly on the veganism (i put skim milk in my cereal since soymilk has been making my throat itch horribly) and i caved and ate a mini snickers. I blame hormones. Either way, if I keep eating cereal i might have to stick to skim milk with it. I don't want to keep having an allergic reaction every time I eat, and its not worth it when I can just put skim milk in it. I've been experimenting with rice milk, but lately my dining hall has only had chocolate rice milk, which is not really a prime ingredient for cereal. Besides those two things, I've been doing good.

Being far from Whitney (the vegan dining hall) makes this diet infinitely more difficult. Whitney makes meals that are awesome for vegans: bourbon tofu, tempeh and broccoli stir fry, bao balls, they cater so well to those wanting to follow the lifestyle. The other dining halls...not so much. I find myself making hummus sandwiches and eating TONS of boca burgers when i'm stuck at any other dining hall on campus. They usually have some sort of vegan option, but it's usually something like white rice and beans or pasta primavera. Just following vegan guidelines isn't good enough for me. i want to choose whole grains and filling foods, and neither of those fit that category in my opinion.

Despite the hassle, I love being vegan. Once i figured out good protein sources, I could tell my body liked it. It opened my eyes to eating pure and whole foods, and to not automatically reach for cookies because they taste good. When I go vegan, my body adapts itself to a diet with less sugar and salt, and it's like bringing myself back to where I want to be nutritionally. I can let myself get really out of whack sometimes, and I definitely did this semester. I was eating ice cream twice a day, and sometimes just wandering around the dining hall picking at baked goods and fried food thinking that it didn't make a difference. i'm ready to get past all of that.

Back to my old ways

I'm going to go back to veganism for awhile. It was something a dabbled with freshman year when I lived super-close to the vegan dining hall on campus (something I still wish was part of my life), but I gave it up when I was consciously trying to put on weight and I rediscovered my love of ice cream.

That said, I've been eating like total shit lately. Ice cream, cookies, just WAY too much crap food that is not good in any way. I'm not saying that eating this stuff is bad. I just have been overloading on it and the damage has taken its toll. Eating vegan reminds me what whole, nutritious food is like...something i need to be brought back to.

Anyway, I started out today but then caved and bought a yogurt. There was nothing nutritious where I was, so yeah, bad start. BUT the point is to ease myself into it and to recognize when I'm reaching for something that is yucky and devoid of nutrients. I know how to make good choices, I just need to put the concept into practice.

But anyway, veganism generally is not hard for me because I've never liked meat, but I'm slightly allergic to soymilk (my stomach gets very queasy when i drink too much of it and my throat will tighten), so that might be a little tough to get around. I'm going to try to water it down. That said, some things will definitely be hard for me to give up.

To name a few:

1. ICE CREAM. i have a huge love affair with ice cream. Especially on campus, they have so many flavors that I literally lose my mind sometimes.

2. chocolate. I hate dark chocolate, and milk chocolate is just so, so yummy.

3. cookies. The milk and eggs unfortunately make this not vegan, and that totally sucks.

I also want to preface this with I am not overly conscious about this. I don't avoid certain ingredients like that plague because they are a byproduct of a chemical once found in an animal that lived on Pangaea. Basically, i don't read ingredients in-depth. Also, if I'm ever at a super nice restaurant where eating vegan just isn't an option, I will abandon it. I don't ever want to have to be accommodated--although people are generally super nice about that--so I just will suck it up when I need to.


Wish me luck on my endeavors :)

Oh Dear

this little piggy drank a little too much last night. I woke up dizzy, nauseous, and about ready to pass out.

I got up to go to the bathroom and when i got there I got this overwhelming sense that I was going to faint. I was brushing my teeth and literally supporting myself entirely on the counter, wondering how I was going to make it back to my room. I sat down on the potty to regroup and then worked my way back.

My stomach was so upset but I knew I needed to eat something, and strangely I was having cravings for really heavy, salty food. So i ate pizza and baked ziti and felt a hundred times better. Weird, right?

Tonight i'm taking it super-easy. super, duper easy.

Thank God

...It's FRIDAY! After a long week of tests and quizzes, I could not be happier that its the weekend. I ended this awesome week on a great note, which was most likely failing the hardest quiz I've ever taken in my entire life. Some of the question I truly felt like I was reading hieroglyphics.

Yesterday was pretty fun, however. A friend from the fraternity ZBT invited me to play beer pong with him in a boy-girl tournament. We made it through the preliminary round-robin to win our division, but lost in the first round of the tournament :( I still had fun though and I was glad I went. I never do anything like that and I love meeting new people, which I definitely did last night! I also knocked a beer bottle onto two people sitting on the couch which was stellar.

Anyway, on a sadder note, UCONN is raising its tuition over 5 percent.

http://www.dailycampus.com/news/bot-increases-tuition-by-5-7-percent-1.1165779

This is very saddening. People already can't afford school, and the school can't afford to keep running. I feel like everyone is backed into a corner and nobody can pay their way out of this mess. The federal reserve today announced they are going to start raising bank interest rates on loans so money isn't coming out of every direction that doesn't even exist, but I can't stand to read more people losing their jobs anymore. I look around me and see so many kids who parents are out of work struggling to keep their daughter or son in college and you just have no idea who's suffering and who's not. I'm so lucky to have parents who both are still working, and even though we've been affected there's so many worse situations out there, it hurts my heart. I want everything to go back to normal but this bad economy is so global, even entire COUNTRIES are affected. Germany has to bail out Greece. That's one ENTIRE country bailing out another. It's just a horrible, horrible situation.

Before I get to down on myself thinking about how shitty the state of things are, I am going to sign off and remind myself its the WEEKEND and that is a very good thing, and even if you are living weekend to weekend and only get excited for two measly days out of seven, that's better than nuthin'.

Have a super, duper Friday Night!

Dance Dance Revolution

So last weekend I went to a Girltalk concert and oh. my. god. what an amazing experience that was. You haven't discovered dehydration until you're dancing for 2 hours to this man mashing up songs. He played everything from Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" to Ke$sha's "Tik Tok" to every rap song imaginable. It was such a high-intensity concert and Girltalk (who's real name is greg but seriously, i'm calling him Girltalk) was so high energy. He jumped up and down the entire time and didn't rest once. You go, Girltalk. You go.

The best part of the concert was WE WERE ON STAGE! My friend was dressed so ridiculous (a lot of people were...I didn't get the memo) that one of the people running the show asked him if he wanted to dance next to Girltalk when the show started. My friend then asked if he could bring his friends onstage, too. The people were hesitant, but by that time we had all stuck out our arms for wristbands so the woman handing them out really couldn't say no.

I wish we had gotten some photos, but unfortunately my friend only managed to track down this incredibly random one that is not only out-of-focus, but at an (artistic?) Dutch Angle:

I'm on the far right in the blue plaid and black leggings.

By the end of the show I was literally dripping....DRIPPING, DRENCHED, SOAKED in sweat. my shirt was completely saturated with it. I was so thirsty I started picking up water bottles off of the ground and drinking them. Yes, gross, but it was either die of thirst or drink questionable water.

Anyway, good news! My eco-column "The Green Scene" for the university newspaper, The Daily Campus, is off to a good start! You can read the articles I have written here:


http://www.dailycampus.com/focus/the-green-scene-explore-foods-try-new-protein-sources-1.1159621

http://www.dailycampus.com/focus/drink-less-beer-save-more-trees-1.1120843

http://www.dailycampus.com/focus/the-dark-truth-behind-the-kindle-1.1109918


Hope you like!

Rainiest. Birthday. EVER.

I woke up this birthday morning to the pictured beautiful view out of my window:

niiiiiiiice.

Anyhoo, at about 8:45 I woke up naturally so I decided, with class at noon, I'd go get my workout over with. I put on my shorts and decided I'd hustle my ass over there without any sweats on.

Big Mistake.

As soon as I got to the gym, I realized that somewhere on my journey over there I dropped my key and my ID card (which are attached to each other). As I searched frantically through my bag the girl at the front of the gym went off about how I can use a non-refundable deposit to pay for it or something...little did she know getting into the gym was my last concern at the moment. If you lose your dorm key, they have to replace the lock on your door which costs $100. Yeah, it was time to panic.

I immediately retraced my steps like a maniac, scouring the wet and muddy ground for any glimmer of my key. No luck. I roamed my dorm and every place I covered that morning (which was pretty much the bathroom and back), and then sat on the floor and cried. I don't know why I decided crying was the best option in that situation, and looking back I completely overreacting. At the time, however, I was stuck in shorts and a t-shirt, wet, cold, and just overall not ready to deal with such a catastrophe at so early in the morning. I felt so defeated and not even a birthday was going to redeem the day.

I called "The Front Desk" (the vague descriptor of the people who will unlock your door if you happen to be so unfortunate as to lock yourself out) and I waited patiently outside of my room for about 40 minutes until someone finally came to let me in. At around 9:30, I realized that I shouldn't just mope around in my room hoping my key will fall from the sky, so I went back to the gym to relieve some of the adrenaline from my veins and recuperate from the trauma I was suffering.

I also kept my phone diligently by my hand in case I got in e-mail to my blackberry about it..

LO AND BEHOLD, about twenty minutes later I receive an e-mail saying someone picked up my keycard and it was nearby! I raced over there to retrieve it, and I can happily say that i am now blogging in the comfort of my dorm, sitting pretty because it's my birthday and I'm not locked out of my own residence.

I went to the dining hall immediately after I got my keycard back only to have someone hand it to me for a second time. I dropped it in the lunchline.

My keycard is currently attached to my belt loop...and it will be for the rest of the week.

A Themed Weekend

This was a weekend of themed parties, I guess people went a little crazy with the first real weekend back. The first night was a "hoedown throwdown" that I dressed up for an ended up never making it to. I went to pregame with a few friends and by the time we got to the party, there was a line out the door to get it. We decided it wasn't worth it and went to an apartment instead, which ended up being a great time so everything worked out in the end.


The next day I went out for an 8.47 mile run. It was a great run and I went outside my normal route to run near this lake that I found back in the summer. I took a whole video of it that I was going to post, but as I watched it I realized that my camera work was a little too shaky and the entire content was a little too boring, so I opted out of posting it. I basically ran and talked about nothing.

The next night was a "Jersey Shore"-themed party at ZBT (Zeta Beta Tau), a fraternity a friend of mine is close with. We poofed our hair, put on our highest stilettos, and picked up some quick New York Accents. The words "jerk off" snuck into my vocabulary a few times above average.


My friend Kate and I eventually got onto the Pong table, and we housed these two brothers. It was SO much fun because we went two out of three and got them when we both made the last cup in one turn. I love when we beat guys because nobody expects a team of girls to be decent, but Kate and I are a diesel team. Last year's devotion to TKE parties and my ex-boyfriend as my permanent partner last year taught me a few things about how to play. I'm still not daring enough to do death cups and anything too crazy, but I'll throw in the occasional bounce to prove that I don't completely suck.

The drama went down when we left ZBT and went to a friend's house who was having a party.

It was a BIG party and a ton of TKE guys were there. I used to be great friends with all these people when I was still with my ex-boyfriend, and unsurprisingly, he was there too. However, my good friends, including one I've been having a minor fling with, were DJing this party. In my drunken stupor, I was a little overly flirtatious with this boy and it definitely pissed of The Ex. He asked me if that was me and I adamantly denied it, so hopefully he believed me because I truly don't want to ruffle any feathers and was just trying to have a good time. However, it was nice to see all of the guys I used to spend 90% of my time with. Breaking up with the ex was hard because I had become part of his circle of friends in his fraternity, and I knew my friend network was really going to change when he wasn't in my life anymore. And it did. I missed all those guys so much, not to say that I'm not completely happy with the friends I have now. Everything worked out in the end.

I'm pooped this weekend, so I just plan to kind of kick back and watch the Jets game at 4 and call it a day. Have a great rest of the weekend everyone.