I had a lunch date today so I went to the earlier CrossFit class. I almost didn’t make it. Even if I had been awake for some time, it was a bitch getting up at a time when I am normally still in bed.

The combination of the heat and a low carb diet (almost zero carbs for two days) made me very dizzy and shaky. There was no way I could do CrossFit in that condition. So I had two minuscule melon slices (about two inch, very thinly-sliced slices). Then I made myself some hard-boiled eggs.

I felt a little bit better…

WOD was:

20 minutes to finish three reps of:

• 400 m. run (Equivalent to two laps in a frickin’ steamin’ outdoor parking lot, thank you very much!)
• 15 burpees
• 20 toes-to-bar (- I did 25 V-ups instead, which still didn’t look anything like that video.)

That was nasty. With my explosive cough, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I had to go to the bathroom to pound on my chest and try to force open my air passages. I didn’t think I was going to finish and so I took my sweet time with the third rep. I walked part of the 400 meters and crawled through the burpees. When it came to the V-ups, I was well-prepared to just do a few before time ran out. I broke the set down to five reps at a time, with a lot of gasping for air in between. And then, miraculously, I finished. With 15 seconds left on the clock.

Then I hung around and traded stories with some of the girls, while watching the next class go through the WOD, till it was time for lunch.

Lunch was with girlfriend, Leah Caringal, who visited me in Siargao recently and happens to work at the same building that houses CrossFit. (Needless to say I showed up gross and sweaty in my workout clothes.) We ate at a nearby Chinese diner. We had pork with Chinese broccoli leaves and stems, scallops with asparagus, and steamed fish. All of which would be fine, except for that they were cooked in soy sauce. Not very Paleo but I just had to let that go.

I’m drinking a lot of water, but I’ve already lost two kilos. Apart from being constantly thirsty, I’m tired a lot and I feel… hmmm… uncomfortable. Which makes me restless and impatient. The heat isn’t helping. (My room is a goddam oven.)

Stranger than all of these, however, is that the thought of meat or anything fried nauseates me. When a few weeks ago, I was rhapsodizing with Stephen about how the best things in life are breaded and deep-fried.

Now that I can’t have any fruit, I’ve become aware of how much of it I consume everyday. In Siargao, I’ve already cut down but I still have, at least, one banana and one mango with my green smoothies/anti-oxidant shakes, and a whole lot of coconut water that I drink throughout the day. (Not to mention the coconut milk/cream that goes into the shakes and the food. While coconut milk/cream is mostly fat, I’m sure it’s got to have some sugar content because it does lend a certain sweetness to whatever it’s used in.) In Manila, sometimes I’ll have a whole fruit platter to myself. The thought of never having fruit again for the rest of my life is pretty darned depressing, but that could be the carb-depletion talking. Induction phase, please be over soon!