So the shots are done, the super-low-calorie transition days are behind me, and I’m now officially into the next (final?) phase of the HCG experience.

A few vignettes, mostly food-related:

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I had understood that sugars, grains, breads, and starchy veggies (corn, carrot, potatoes) were all still forbidden during this phase. What I didn’t wake up to until yesterday was that things like beans, lentils, and chickpeas are also verboten. So my fantasies of enjoying celery sticks with hummus or making a batch of my three-bean chili are on hold for another few weeks.

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I’m trying to get a bit more understanding of the body sensations around hunger and satiation. At this stage of the protocol, there’s no limits on the amount of food you can have — just a strong recommendation to be conscious of eating only till you’re full, rather than going into any addictive eating patterns.

Being aware of actual hunger and stopping points is something I haven’t always (often?) been paying attention to in the last couple years, so it’s kind of a new sensation.

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Now that I don’t have to monitor my portions so obsessively, Mr. Mezzo and I can go back to doing some cooking together. Which is a nice return to form.

We’re probably going to use my HCG cookbook for a good stretch of these weeks. The flavors are good, we can figure out how to adjust the portions to make things with a full package of chicken or beef, and that way we’ll know that I’m avoiding sugars and starches like I’m supposed to.

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I’ll be doing a gall bladder/liver cleanse late next week into the weekend. The first step of that? Cutting all oils and fats out of your diet for a few days.  Just a few days after I was allowed to bring them back into my diet after a six-week break.

Yeah, there’s some flavor of irony to that.

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The first use of Chapstick was every bit as blissful as I had hoped it would be.

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I am astonished to see the sheer quantity of foods that have added sugar in them. It took me a LONG time reading labels at Whole Foods to find mustard, spaghetti sauce, salad dressing and almond butter that don’t have added sugars and are thus permissible to me right now.

I still haven’t found any ketchup or flavored yogurt that would work.

Even though I haven’t been strongly focused on this detox movement as a way to “create healthier eating habits” for myself, I had been quietly toying in the back of my mind with the notion of making this experience the starting point for a longer-term reduction in the quantity of added sugar in my life.

On the one hand, my recent label-reading has me thinking that could be a really important step, considering all the hidden ways sugar’s been pushed into the cultural system. On the other hand, there’s a whiny child part of me that’s feeling annoyed with how hard it’s going to be if I do keep moving towards sugar reduction, because of all the ways it’s hidden in the food supply.

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I have not succumbed to old addictions by coating myself with cheese sauce. Yet.

But I am so making some form of cheese omelette for myself this weekend.

I also have fantasies of getting a Dunkin’ Donuts iced coffee — no flavor, no sweetener, just ice coffee and cream. If I add my own Stevia drops, I think that might just be within my new set of restrictions.

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Image credit: http://naturalnoshing.wordpress.com/2012/01/01/black-eyed-pea-hummus/