Food boredom

I've been doing this diet for ten weeks now and if there is one thing that could make me give up it would be boredem, food boredom, my taste buds are soooooo bored.

I can handle a shake for breakfast and lunch. I can handle the previously mentioned aquaholic camel-esque water intake. I can handle not drinking soft drink or fruit juice and not eating lollies, cakes or biscuits. That's all fine, no big deal.

But what I am really struggling with is that lack of variety in our evening meal. Before beginning this diet I had embarked on a new way of cooking, I'd been to taste.com.au and downloaded hundreds of recipes, I was creating a weekly menu planner, we were eating lots of new things and different things all the time.

Now each and every week is basically like this:

Monday: fish and salad
Tuesday: sausages and salad
Wednesday: Omlette, or scrambled eggs or tuna and salad
Thursday: chicken breast and salad
Friday: meal at the pub (comes with salad, yay!)
Saturday: Steak and salad
Sunday: crumbed chicken and salad

I'm bored to death, and I'm particularly sick of salad. I've never been a fan of vegetables, cooked or in salad and ten weeks of it hasn't improved it's appeal. I'm also fed up with excessive flatulence and the associated stomach pains which I suspect is from all the onion and capsicum I've been ingesting. Initially I looked forward to the evening meal, real food to chew on after shakes all day, but now I dread it, it's just become something to endure and half the time I'm not even hungry. I'm starting to think that perhaps I am physically hungry but my mind is telling me I'm not because the food is so unappetising.

Of course the simple solution would be to find some great low carb recipes and get cooking but it's not that easy. Our shitty local "supermarket" lacks so many key ingedients for tasty food and even many normal staples are consistenly unavailable, for instance I haven't been able to buy cottage cheeese for 6 weeks. And you can forget herbs, they don't keep so they just don't bother, that lops alot of asian recipes off the menu. Want fresh meat? Buy it Thursday, the rest of the week you need to thaw out what you have frozen. The limited fruit and vegetable range is delivered Tuesday along with dairy and sliced meat. Fresh fish? Non existent, frozen/boxed only. If they forget to order something you wait a week and hope they remember it on the next order. To add insult to injury with the limited choice, the goods are inferior (I didn't buy strawberries today - furry strawberries, bleh) and we pay far more than anyone else.

I'm so sick of it, it's hard enough to create an appetising and varied menu here with the limitations of the supermarket, but when you are on a diet and have so many restrictions it's near impossible. The sooner we leave this place the better. I want to shop at a real supermarket again.