2 and a half days without corn

Epic Failure.

I took on the challenge starting after class on Tuesday. It lasted 3 days. I decided that I would completely cut out anything that had corn, corn products, or ate corn ever in it's life. This would have been much easier to accomplish if I was buying and preparing my own food. Unfortunately, as a freshman I am forced to eat most of my meals in TDR. This diet simply doesn't work when you don't have control over what food options are available. I could not eat any of the foods which are my staples, so I had to rediscover the options available in TDR. This in itself has proven to be a good thing. My diet is more diverse post-no-corn experiment. TDR has very, very few foods which don't fit somewhere in the corn cycle. About the only food I could eat was fruit, black beans, and granola(which I'm still not sure whether it's corn-free or not because one of my friends mentioned that it had butter, but I couldn't find any mentioned in the maker's recipe). This was a HUGE calorie reduction for me. I'm used to eating probably 3,000-4,000 calories a day. The beginning of this diet also coincided with me beginning my bike training for this summer when I'm biking from Venice across through Southern France, then up the coast to Brittany, over to Paris, and up into Belgium. So the reduction in calories, plus a significant drop in protein (TDR's bean supply was irregular, they only had beans at 2 of the 7 meals I ate), coupled with me training for this bike ride resulted in me losing weight at an alarming rate. So, I stopped. Another effect of the options available at TDR was that I ate probably 15 to 20 servings of fruit a day, with no grains to absorb the acid, such that by the third day, my stomach was burning with acid, and tissue in my mouth had begun to be eaten away by the acid.

All of this succeeded very well in demonstrating the extent to which corn has pervaded our food system, which is very alarming from many perspectives - health, economic, security, etc.