Day 18-- Cheese where are art thou?

I miss cheese.  I thought by now I would be dying for chocolate, cake, cookies.  Or maybe a glass of wine, or a beer.  And I'm missing those things a little when they appear right in front of me, but the only thing I have seriously considered cheating for is cheese.

Let me be clear, I am not really a big cheese eater normally.  I am very picky.  I like high quality, generally soft cheeses along with parmesan.  And I never eat cheese plain or in large amounts (except for pizza), but I never noticed how many things I add a sprinkle to.  I don't mind trading out pasta for spaghetti squash or quinoa, but I'm missing the parmesan on top.  I love a good salad, but I usually have a little chevre mixed in.

And tonight I made one of my favorite dishes-- eggplant parmesan.  I roasted instead of breaded the eggplant, which I like better sometimes anyways.  I swapped out noodles for quinoa and spinach, and I made fresh tomato sauce.  But there is no eggplant parmesan without cheese.  So this week I bought a bag of dairy free, soy free cheese.  I got the best stuff out there (i.e. most expensive).

Totally vile.

Now what in the world made me think I would like vegan cheese, when my culinary arch-nemesis is processed cheese?  But I miss cheese SO MUCH.  I've done all kinds of things on this detox I thought I would never do, and with spectacular results, so when vegan cheese was recommended, I went for it.

It was so bad, I'm almost offended.  Here we are, eating super clean whole foods, and while parmesan cheese is apparently the enemy, a fake substitute is okay.  I feel like a family member of mine was personally insulted.  I almost put on some parmesan out of spite.

And then I laughed at myself.

But unless I see extensive proof that eating small amounts of low lactose, high quality cheese is going to kill me in the next five years it's going back in my diet in a week and a half.  And really Arbonne is n't saying the eating cheese will kill you.  It's just hard to digest and that needs to be taken into account when I consider what goes into my body.

It's hard though, because underneath it all, I am a teacher's pet.  I want to get a hundred percent, and we are getting a lot of info of how hard various foods are on our gut.  So I want a perfect score, and a perfect score to me means never eating any of these things again (which again isn't necessarily what Arbonne is implying).  But permanently eliminating all of this forever will only make me resentful and prone to ditch the whole clean eating idea.

What makes more sense is over the next week and a half I am going to carefully reevaluate how I was eating and how I am eating now.  I need to be mindful of what I am going to add back in to my diet, what needs to stay out except on rare occasions (and what rare means) and what I am DONE with.