Hello Everyone!! Hope your first week in the New Year was a MASSIVE SUCCESS!!!

Day 5 of my keto challenge went very well. After some rest, I was feeling much better following my dental procedures :) The sedation messed with my sleep schedule, my body, and my mind a little bit on day 4, but by day 5, I was back to my usual self :) This was great timing, because I did have to work from 2-slow this day.

WHAT I ATE

BREAKFAST:
This day we did not have our green shake. We did not have any ripe avocados ,and since my fiance was sick, he did not feel up to running to the store right away. Also, because we stayed up a little too late the night before, and we decided to sleep in. This caused us to unfortunately miss breakfast, a rare happening for us, but it does happen to everyone once in a while!

LUNCH:
For lunch on Day 5, my fiance prepared a lovely salmon, baked in delicious grass fed butter with herbs and spices, with tender steamed broccoli and a bit of cottage cheese. This was a delicious energy boost, and the cottage cheese satisfied a "sweet" that I was looking for with those 2 tiny carbs per cup.

I had a "second lunch" or you could call it an early dinner at work. It's an amazing Mexican restaurant, but it can be quite tricky to find things I can eat there that are totally keto friendly. No burritos, floutas, tortillas, rice or beans. No salsa, no sodas, no deep fried ice cream. No sopapillas, or flan or chimichangas. The struggle is real because I still have to serve other people these amazing delicious dishes that I won't be eating for a while, and still love dearly! Haha life can be cruel! :)

I decided on a taco salad! I ordered it with ground beef, no taco shell of course, without tomatoes, extra olives, cheese, sour cream and our fresh made house guacamole. I wish the lettuce at work was more nutritious, but unfortunately they only use iceberg for all the salads. Luckily, they really load it up with meat, so this was still a delicious and nutritious keto meal :) They put all the ground beef on the bottom, so you can't really see it in the photo, but there is a lot!!

DINNER:
I did not get home from work this day until around 9 pm. So we did not have dinner since , as you may remember, my fiance was not feeling well, and he had already eaten a snack. I had my own snack too! I had two cheese sticks, and one of my lovely keto Cappuccino Cheesecake servings that I had made on Day 4
:)

By the end of day five, I had finished off 136 ounces of water, making it one of my best days so far for hydration!! I did use my little trick of adding some lime juice to the water, to encourage myself to drink more of it :)

SUMMARY:
For this day, the Cronometer tracker shows that I was (not surprisingly) a little high in protein and low in fat. This day came in at 58% Fat, 35% Protein, and 7% carbs. I am guessing that these numbers are askew because of how much meat they put in the taco salad at work, so in the future, I will be asking for a smaller meat portion so as not to throw my numbers out of scale.

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For Day 5 , my carb and sugar levels look great, and hydration, as I already mentioned above was excellent !

Vitamin levels for this day look pretty good, with the exceptions of being a bit low in Vitamin B1, Folate, and Vitamin E. As I have mentioned in previous blogs , if these levels are persistently low , I will look into supplementing these areas naturally or via a vitamin supplement.

Day Five's mineral levels don't look too shabby either, but they do fall a little short in Manganese, Magnesium, Iron, and Potassium. As you may remember, I did take a Trace-Mins supplement on Day 3, but may need to increase the frequency of taking this supplement if these numbers persist as well. Since that supplement cannot be entered into the system due to insufficient precision of label information, I am left "guessing" at mineral nutrition at this point in time .

As I already mentioned earlier, protein is a little too high on this day. I will be working at keeping protein more in check going forward, so as to stay true to a keto diet form. I have read that it is easy to try to substitute carbs with protein, so I will be making a conscious effort not to do that myself :)

CONCLUSION:

Day 5 of eating keto was excellent, and each day it gets easier for me to continue on my keto path. I do not believe that my body is in full ketosis yet, but I do think that I am well on my way to success. I did have the strange sensation today of things looking "clearer" or "crisper." I am not sure how else to explain the visual clarity that I was experiencing! Also, I've been having more consistent digestion, and less nausea and upset stomachs, so that is another great plus! I really have no complaints about the diet so far :)

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Brightest Blessings!!
SO MUCH LOVE!!
Evening Star