I was at my second home today- Whole Foods- looking at the cottage cheeses. The cheese will replace the salmon I've been eating, because I believe the negative changes I've seen in my skin and digestion are due to the fish. As I looked at the display, my heart sank because I remembered how much I hated eating this bland stuff while on my Weight Watchers diet. Nonetheless, I decided on an organic brand that had the fewest weird and unnatural-sounding ingredients. This brand has a tart flavor and touts live culture content. I bought two 16-oz containers of it (and 5 bottles of kombucha tea!).

I must say that I believe that those who speculate that we overeat partly because of the multitude of herbs and spices we add to our foods are right. And by the way, that observation is not new; it was made ages ago by people such as the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who noted over 200 years ago that people with access to spicy foods tended to make gluttons of themselves. With that in mind, I realize I probably shouldn't be eating strongly flavored foods like smoked salmon. If I found it easy to make a glutton of myself eating extremely sweet and salty foods in my SAD days, I know I could do the same with the fish. I've already gone from eating it once a day to eating it at lunch AND dinner. I could easily eat it for breakfast, too. That's probably a warning sign to me (if the other signs weren't enough) that I should back off. Cottage cheese is probably just what the doctor ordered: 14 grams of protein and 1 gram of fat per 1/2 cup, and mild flavoring. The switch from salmon to cottage cheese will net me more protein, less fat, and not fill me up as much as the fish did.

Now, is there such a thing as raw milk cottage cheese, I wonder...?