Monday is typically a fasting day, but I didn’t fast all day yesterday. I didn’t eat breakfast, and I never eat lunch, but I had dinner close to 9 pm after arriving home from work. Dinner consisted of my standard giant salad, which included some white cheddar cheese and salted cashews. Of course, I sampled the cheese and cashews before actually making the salad, so ultimately I consumed too much of both. While I’m aware that my sodium intake is too high, I haven’t yet done anything about it, but I’ve reached the point at which I need to because I think retained water is skewing my weigh-ins.

According to my scale, I put on over three pounds yesterday. I’m not too alarmed because I suspect that much of that weight is simply water, but I need to make more of an effort to avoid sodium. The cheese probably needs to go entirely as cheese is high-fat, high-calorie, and inflammatory. The nuts will stay, but I need to use unsalted nuts, so I’m going to start using raw almonds. I love cashews, but I tend to eat too many of them even when they’re unsalted because they taste a bit sweet to me. So my salads will be vegan from here on out, but they won’t be keto-friendly because I love hummus in my salads.

While digging into the subject of cortisol yesterday, I discovered that green tea can lower cortisol levels, so I’m going to try drinking at least one cup of it per day. In the past, I’ve tried green tea and hated it, but apparently I was making it incorrectly. The water is supposed to be heated to no more than 180 degrees and the teabag should only be steeped for three minutes. I got a basic electric kettle with temperature control yesterday, and today I drank a couple of cups of green tea, which was not awful.

Green tea contains EGCG, which has been shown to have a positive effect on glucose control, weight management, and blood pressure. It also contains catechins, which have been shown to stimulate thermogenesis and decrease the absorption of lipids by the intestines (see https://tinyurl.com/2s36jedf). I think I mentioned all of this yesterday, but I’ve had it on my mind since then, so I’m delving further into it.

Now, since I’ve consumed two cups of coffee and two cups of green tea, I have to end this post and go pee.