I hope no one has gotten the impression that because I haven't posted for a while, I've quit dieting. Not at all. I had my 9-week weigh-in today for a five-pound loss, total so far in the diet: 38. So I am still averaging a little more than four pounds loss per week, which is to my satisfaction.

I just have been very busy with other things, and also went through something of a depression. What happens when I am depressed or anxious is that I get carb cravings. They can start almost immediately after I have a meal, and last for hours. One possible culprit was flushed out: chicken-stock powder for which I didn't have packaging to check its carb content (I bought it bulk). I bought some super-low carb liquid stuff. But that hasn't totally solved the problem. It's emotional.

You might suspect, reading about someone losing a lot of weight in one shot, that it is perhaps not the only major change happening in their life.  That would be true with me, though to explain the whole thing would take up too much space here.  Perhaps the best way to explain it is breaking away from negative energy: negative thought-patterns, negative habits, negative relationships.  I have my ups and downs, my triumphs and discouragements, my struggles when the nasty past succeeds in dragging me back into that old "I am worthless" worldview.  But when I do a retrospective, I see I am doing as well with that whole process as I am with the diet.

I've hit on a few winner recipes that unfortunately I didn't record and so are down the memory-hole. But I can say at this point I've perfected the morning omelet enough that I always have it the same way now: the seasonings are about 1/4 tsp sea-salt, 1 1/2 tsp chopped garlic, and 1/4 tsp poultry seasoning. The poultry seasoning, I would say, is the secret. I also have learned that you can make the IP "Tomato Basil Soup," which tastes pretty lame, taste half-decent by the addition of a hefty amount of chopped garlic and a slight amount of curry powder--not enough to actually make the soup taste like a curry, just enough to deepen and complicate the taste.

But here's a winner I came up with today:

IP Curry Leek Soup

Chopped asparagus                   \
Chopped portabello mushrooms |--  2 cups
Chopped Belgian endive            /
2 tbsp low-carb chicken stock
2 tsp chopped garlic
1 packet IP Cream of Leek soup
ground pepper, sea salt and curry powder to taste. (Again - not enough curry to make it taste like a curry.)

Saute the veggies, pepper and garlic in the chicken stock. Mix soup in your shaker as usual, adding curry and salt. When veggies are al dente, pour soup over them, keep on heat until soup is piping hot (but not until it curdles) and serve.

With the leek flavour and the garlic, this soup has a strong allium orientation, and I was thinking of enhancing that with another little trick I use to get around the no-cooked-onions rule: buying one of the sweeter types of onions, e.g. Vidalia, and cooking it very slightly, just enough to heat.  That mostly keeps its raw zingy flavour.  I decided after tasting this soup that that would be too much; the Belgian endive adds enough tang.  Adding the curry is a perfect foil to the allium taste (you might notice in Indian cooking they use onions and curry together all the time).