Day 16 Or...The Gradual Return of Hunger

Eating is significantly better than not eating. For a variety of reasons.

My recent lack of appetite, due to a very minor episode of feeling sick, has left me with rather short and presumably uninteresting blog posts. Let me sure you that this is not a sign of things to come over the next few weeks of the project. It's just a natural result of a blog centered around my consumption of vegetarian-friendly food.

Luckily today, I returned to my "normal" eating habits.

This morning around 7:30 I awoke with a remarkable amount of energy. For the first time in, I'm not really sure when, I got up to play with and feed Isaiah while Carolyn went back to sleep. We had a lot of fun and I'm sure my lovely wife enjoyed sleeping in a few minutes more.

I went on to make homemade biscuits for breakfast. I realized while I was stirring the dough that I was excited about cooking for the first time in a couple of days, which meant I was excited about eating again. Which, I admit, is a strange thing to be so sincerely thrilled about. It felt good to eat more than one biscuit. Having meat with it, was thankfully, the farthest thing from my mind.

However, by lunch, I had about 30 meal options with meat and only one without.

Carolyn, Isaiah, and I had traveled to visit our good friend Dakota and we decided to choose Subway for lunch. As you know, from the horribly repetitive ad campaign, Subway is home to the $5 footlong. And those options include the meatball sub, the black forest ham, the oven roasted chicken, and the "spicy italian" that features both pepperoni and salami.

What did I order? I ordered their not-so-famous Veggie Delite. To be honest, while it was a little hard to see the three other people at the table bite into their meat-filled sandwiches, I have been a fan of their veggie sub for more than a year. I tried it a good while back when I noticed that by the time I loaded a turkey sub up with lettuce, onions, spinach, pickles, bell peppers, banana peppers, and sweet onion sauce... I couldn't taste the meat anymore anyway. In fact, my longtime enjoyment of Subway's veggie sub was a huge motivator that I could actually survive this Go Veg Project.

And so, after a couple days of not enjoying food, this was like the return of a familiar friend. A friend that you can buy for five bucks and then eat in the company of friends and family. Okay, so it wasn't really like a friend at all.

Yet, I must say, this Veggie Delite (on Italian bread) tasted phenomenal. I'm not sure if my photos really do it justice, but this was also the best looking veggie sub I've ever received at a Subway. It could have been straight out of a commercial.

In the past when I've ordered the Veggie Delite, the "sandwich artist" (which what they're really called by the way) almost always noticeably tries to fight back the confused and befuddled look of "why someone would order a sandwich without meat." Then they typically proceed not to put that many veggies on the "Veggie Delite" because... who would really want to eat all those vegetables?

Very rarely does an employee realize that because there's no meat, I actually want a magnanimous amount of veggies on my sandwich. This sandwich artist, however, defied what had become my expectations of what the veggie sub should look like.

Obviously, I was pleased with the sandwich and couldn't eat much more than half of it. Which is why that "half" also made an excellent dinner. You should try one.

And Subway, if you pay me a large amount of cash, I'll be glad to write more about how much I delight in your Veggie Delite. Otherwise, despite my good experience with it today, I probably won't eat one for a while. As they say, variety is the spice of life.


- What did I eat on Day 16?

Breakfast. I ate two biscuits made using my latest recipe of choice. With strawberry preserves. Mmmmm.

Lunch. The Subway Veggie sub. I ordered a $5 footlong, but no, I didn't sing that song. And believe it or not, I actually couldn't finish it. I also enjoyed Baked Lay's potato chips with it.

Later, Carolyn and I shared a chocolate milkshake at the Dairy Bar in Whitley City, Kentucky. Check that place out if you're ever in the area.

Dinner. The rest of my "Veggie Delite." A little random, and pointless, trivia for you about this sandwich. In his appropriately titled book, "Jared, the Subway Guy," Jared Fogle, ate the footlong Veggie Delite for each and every dinner during his now well-publicized "diet" and exercise program that resulted in his amazing weight loss.

16 days down. 24 to go.
Tomorrow, I'm going to try a new recipe I think.