Turning Japanese & Rule #42

We stuck with the traditional Japanese diet almost all week with only a few exceptions. Every morning we ate miso soup or rice and egg. For lunch and dinners we had tofu, rice, noodles, veggies, soy sauce, miso, ginger, fruit, fish, fish and more fish. The only time we strayed from this diet was when we ate outside of our house. On Saturday night we celebrated my birthday and my mother cooked us some french food (there is no better birthday present than a home cooked meal by your mother--especially if your mother is as good of cook as mine!).

The hardest part about this week was avoiding white flour (aka bread!). A traditional Japanese diet only consists of maybe rice flour or buckwheat flour (no wonder Japanese are so skinny--bread is something I eat way too much of). Japanese also do not eat very many sweets (a daily battle I struggle with). I felt like my meals filled me up more quickly because they were so full of protein. Also, Japanese only traditionally eat until they are 80% full--this was hard for me to stick to. Overall, I felt extremely healthy this week!

Here are just a few pictures of some of the meals we had (I did not capture nearly all of them and Ryan is currently in the kitchen cooking our last Japanese meal of the week--a veggie tofu stir-fry that smells amazing).

We obviously had to try out some traditional Japanese beer.



Japanese noodles and veggies.



Salmon and miso green beans.


Had to go out for sushi (we have all of the materials to make our own but we have still not gotten around to it).


My friend Susie trying to protect herself from the crazy boys taking sake bombs.


Next week we are moving on to Rule #42: Regard nontraditional foods with skepticism. Basically this rule boils down to avoid foods created by food scientists.