Still Going Renegade (Round 2, Phase 2, Day 15)

I am being far from perfect on this diet this time around, and I was pretty damn close to perfect in Round 1.

Here are the diet tenets I am following:

• HCG drops 3x a day (was doing 12, upped it to 15 to see if helped with hunger)
• Eating 99% protocol foods
• Eating VLCD (I have gone as far as 700 cals, but only on days when I run)
• Drinking tons of water.
• Absolutely, positively no sugar or gluten

Here's where I'm being a bad-ass renegade:

• Diet coke! Drank it a few days in a row and didn't notice a change in weight loss, so I'm having some more often. I know this is something I should forgo because it is chemical crap, but it just keeps me from feeling so deprived.
• Mixing vegetables. Today I had 2 c of salad with all core vegetables. Tonight I'm going to have shrimp with sugar-free salsa.
• A few, small, rare foods that are not on protocol. Ex: 3-5 rice crackers (no sugar, no gluten) last night, protein shake this morning before running (with stevia, not fake sugar or real sugar) and a banana. My run felt fantastic this morning. Much better than when I eat eggs.
• More slacking on measuring vegetables. Spinach is less than 20 calories a cup. Does it really matter if I have 2 or 3 cups?

I'm torn on this. Part of me feels like if I'm going to do this, I should just do it and do it perfectly. Part of me thinks that if I was doing it perfectly, I would have already quit this round. I'm still losing weight at a decent rate even without worrying about wearing gloves when I handle oily food and whether I mix my vegetables at lunch. I also know it is a slippery slope, and part of what I think is great about how strict this diet is that it doesn't give you any room to wiggle, which makes you more successful. Although I'm doing ok even with this amount of wiggle room, will it be a slippery slope to more and more wiggling, eventually resulting in failure?