Started vegan diet

My older daughter was home last weekend and my two daughters were watching the Forks Over Knives documentary. I doing things around the house and half listening to the TV. At some point, it caught my attention and I sat down and started watching it. They kept repeating "plant based, whole foods diet" and then detailing various studies that led them to that conclusion and illustrated its benefits. After a while, my thought was "Why haven't my doctors mentioned this?" So the next day, I started on a vegan diet. My breakfast didn't change a bit - oatmeal with almonds, raisins and tea. Lunch was a little different - no eggs in the salad, no yogurt with my fruit and a peanut butter and raisin sandwich. Supper was different. That was Monday. Tuesday and Wednesday were a little difficult. On Wednesday in particular, I was getting frustrated and a bit apathetic at work. On Thursday, I worked from home so I could get something from the kitchen whenever I liked. I kept notes on what I ate. And that night, my wife made fried rice with avocado and that hit the spot. On Friday, I took way too much food to work and was in a great mood all day.

As far as workouts were concerned, first off - this week was somewhat disrupted. The election was on Tuesday and combined with my slow commute home from LA, pretty much canceled the Tuesday workout. Secondly, we were supposed to go sign some documents directly after work on Thursday so that nixed plans for that workout. Finally, we had rain this week in So Cal which means the dirt tracks aren't necessarily usable. In spite of that, I got in what currently pass for my long runs - 10 miles on pavement on both Monday and Wednesday and Harding Truck Trail on Saturday. The first difference I noticed on Wednesday was that my leg (right soleus/ankle) wasn't bothering me. This could have been for a variety of reasons. However on Saturday, the run was definitely better. This run is - generally speaking - a 9 miles climb followed by a 9 mile descent on a rocky fire road. The previous week, I felt worn out about a mile before the top and felt pretty thrashed at the end. In fact, I made a note in my log questioning whether getting thrashed on Saturday was dragging down the rest of the week. This week, I felt fine pretty much throughout, even getting a little knee lift throughout. I felt a little beat up in the last mile but much better than the previous week. Another more subjective difference was that things looked different. Part of this was due to having rain during the week. So a lot of tracks were visible - deer and even what I think were mountain lion tracks. The other thing to note is that I didn't have a particular optimistic frame of mind going into either my Wednesday or Saturday workouts, thinking that it was quite possible in both cases that I might not put in a full workout. What happened though on the Saturday workout at least was that I started the usual monologue in my head about whatever subject and kept my mind occupied that way. So pretty soon I realize - hey there's the 3 mile point and the run keeps going well after that. I didn't time it but I felt like I was moving pretty well by my current standards.

So in summary, I had some expected rough parts figuring out how to implement the diet as well as some (expected) skepticism from my wife. But even within a week, we've figured out some solutions (dishes) for this diet. And finally, I've seen some physical improvements which could be related. So it's going well so far.