So I’ve finally returned home safely, despite the best efforts of both Delta and the New Jersey weather. When I left, I had every intention of keeping the site updated with my daily food intake, but a single night of home-style southern cooking put an end to that real quickly. The preparation was so far from anything I’m used to that even the power of the internet couldn’t have helped me guess at the calorie content of some of the things I tried – the cherry pie I sampled could have had a pound of sugar in each slice it was so sweet.

So I stopped trying to figure it out and just ate what I wanted and just tried to keep it within reason. Of course, when there’s a diner a block away that makes great milkshakes, and you’ve been playing “This Old House” in the New Jersey heat, ‘within reason’ gets alittle more flexible than it probably should. The one place I absolutely refused to compromise was on soda. Liquid calories like that are just too tempting to play around with.

I came back fully expecting to be 3-5 pounds up from when I left, and I was okay with that. Instead, the scale says I lost about 5 pounds!? Perhaps it’s dehydration, and that weigh-in isn’t realistic, but at the very least it probably means I didn’t gain nearly as much as I thought. If I can get away with just staying even, I’ll be real happy.