The HOSS-3000 is in the shop. I haven't heard the diagnosis yet, but I suspect it's CPU may have a terminal condition that may or may not be related to its liquid-cooling system being low on coolant. We'll see. Fortunately, the wife has a laptop.
While dropping HOSS off at the repair place, my cell phone rang. It was the wife. I called her back and noted that her voice sounded very sad, bordering on tears. It was exactly the tone one might expect from someone who's just been phoned and given news of the death of a beloved relative and is now passing on that news. I braced for the worst.
THE WIFE-- I have bad news.
ME-- Okay.
THE WIFE-- (Practically choking back tears) They brought in Indian food today.
ME-- Shit. I thought you were about to tell me REALLY bad news.
THE WIFE-- It is! I want some!
ME-- So eat some Indian food. It'll be okay.
THE WIFE-- You want some, too?
ME-- (Pausing to consider for approximately .2 seconds) Well, I am in the neighborhood.
THE WIFE-- See you in a sec.
Showing posts with label New Program. Show all posts
Showing posts with label New Program. Show all posts
Friday, August 14, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The New Program (Pound Five)
In our emergency backup shipment we ordered chili, beefy vegetable, Maryland crab soup and cream of tomato soup flavors; hot cocoa and chai tea flavored hot drinks; and nacho-chili-cheese puffs.
THE NEW SOUPS-- I'm happy to say we really like almost all the new soups. The chili, while naturally not as good as a real bowl of chili (you know, with diced onions, real beef, and lots of cheese), is still pretty enjoyable stuff. It has actual beans in it as well as a soy-based substance that approximates ground beef and adds to the over all heartiness of the dish. The instructions for preparing it also suggest additional spices are a good idea, so I tend to add more cumin and chili powder to the mix. The only real downside to the chili is that it uses only half a cup of water rather than the standard full cup in order to make it thicker. And while the chili is just as filling, it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that you're only getting half the usual volume. The Maryland Crab Soup is also good and does indeed taste crabby. I just went and stole one of the wife's cream of tomato soups and tried it. It's very reminiscent of any brand of powdered tomato soup and is satisfying in that regard. I just went and stole one of the wife's beefy vegetable soups to try. She probably won't complain, as she's tried it a couple of times and isn't a fan. I, however, prepared it with some low sodium beef broth and found it to taste as good and beefy as one would hope a powdered soup could. I may trade her my extra box of chicken noodle for it.
THE NEW HOT DRINKS-- Since we liked the cappuccino flavored hot drink so well, we ordered hot cocoa and chai tea flavors to try them out. The hot cocoa is, to me, indistinguishable from Swiss Miss powdered cocoa, albeit without the tasty mini-marshmallows. The chai tea is also very nice. In fact, I told the wife that I would be happy to drink something just like it in an Indian restaurant and would never know the difference. I'd order more of both.
NACHO CHILI CHEESE PUFFS-- I'm a big fan of things that are crunchy, particularly things that are crunchy and cheesy and spicy at the same time. Now, Medifast does offer pretzels--a major crunch favorite of mine--but they only come in cinnamon and honey mustard flavors so I declined to order them. Instead, I ordered the nacho chili cheese puffs. When I ordered them, I thought they would basically be a soy-flour version of a Cheeto. They're not as airy, though and come off in consistency more like a Cheeto/Chili Cheese Frito hybrid, which is just fine by me. Taste-wise, they're sort of similar to my hybrid simile, but still doesn't quite reach the best of both worlds "Freeto" scenario. Still, they are not bad and if you're jonesing for something snacky and crunchy they can fill the void for you. Quantity-wise, you might expect that with a diet food there would only be, like, four of them in a given bag. However, Medifast to their infinite credit actually packs their bags pretty full. I'd say there are 30 or 40 of them, each about the size of a Crunch-Berry, per bag. I'll order more of these and might try the other flavors of puff offered.
As for our "real" meal of the day, after dining on four packet meals, getting to eat real food for supper really gives one an appreciation for how much we all take our food for granted. The real meal is supposed to consist of a meat and three veggies, though the amount of each is entirely dependent on what they are. For instance, I could eat seven ounces of fish, six ounces of chicken or five ounces of beef--which is the weight after cooking. Veggies, too, have different limitations, but usually come in half-cup sized portions. The good thing is that there are Medifast real meal recipes aplenty available online with some pretty tasty ideas for ways to stick to it. (The real victim of this diet, however, is our dog Sadie, who no longer gets to have any dog-taxes from our plates whatsoever, cause damn if we're giving any of our food.)
As of this writing, I've lost 19 pounds since the start. I might be further along than that, but we gave ourselves a day of cheating last weekend because we were meeting old friends for Indian Food and pretty much abused the buffet there in our haste to stuff as much of it into our gullets as possible. But, I feel like I rebounded pretty good from that. And 19 pounds in two and a half weeks is nothing to scoff at. I imagine the loss will slow somewhat, but I'll be content with the 2-5 pounds per week the diet suggests.
Over all I have to give Medifast a good rating. I certainly don't get the variety of food I did with Atkins, but at the same time I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat or if I have the ingredients to prepare it but for one meal out of the day.
The trouble with people on diets, particularly ones that are working, is that it can become a source of obsession. (That's kind of the mindset I've found helps me, at least.) Unfortunately, being in that mindset, the diet and weight loss can become the only topic such obsessed dieters tend to talk about. I know I've been guilty of that in the past. Not wanting to be THAT GUY any more than I already have, I plan to stop. In other words, unless a wildly delicious or heinous new Medifast product worthy of review enters my life or unless I lose all the weight I want (or give up on it altogether) this will hopefully be the last you read about it here.
You're welcome.
THE NEW SOUPS-- I'm happy to say we really like almost all the new soups. The chili, while naturally not as good as a real bowl of chili (you know, with diced onions, real beef, and lots of cheese), is still pretty enjoyable stuff. It has actual beans in it as well as a soy-based substance that approximates ground beef and adds to the over all heartiness of the dish. The instructions for preparing it also suggest additional spices are a good idea, so I tend to add more cumin and chili powder to the mix. The only real downside to the chili is that it uses only half a cup of water rather than the standard full cup in order to make it thicker. And while the chili is just as filling, it's hard to wrap your brain around the fact that you're only getting half the usual volume. The Maryland Crab Soup is also good and does indeed taste crabby. I just went and stole one of the wife's cream of tomato soups and tried it. It's very reminiscent of any brand of powdered tomato soup and is satisfying in that regard. I just went and stole one of the wife's beefy vegetable soups to try. She probably won't complain, as she's tried it a couple of times and isn't a fan. I, however, prepared it with some low sodium beef broth and found it to taste as good and beefy as one would hope a powdered soup could. I may trade her my extra box of chicken noodle for it.
THE NEW HOT DRINKS-- Since we liked the cappuccino flavored hot drink so well, we ordered hot cocoa and chai tea flavors to try them out. The hot cocoa is, to me, indistinguishable from Swiss Miss powdered cocoa, albeit without the tasty mini-marshmallows. The chai tea is also very nice. In fact, I told the wife that I would be happy to drink something just like it in an Indian restaurant and would never know the difference. I'd order more of both.
NACHO CHILI CHEESE PUFFS-- I'm a big fan of things that are crunchy, particularly things that are crunchy and cheesy and spicy at the same time. Now, Medifast does offer pretzels--a major crunch favorite of mine--but they only come in cinnamon and honey mustard flavors so I declined to order them. Instead, I ordered the nacho chili cheese puffs. When I ordered them, I thought they would basically be a soy-flour version of a Cheeto. They're not as airy, though and come off in consistency more like a Cheeto/Chili Cheese Frito hybrid, which is just fine by me. Taste-wise, they're sort of similar to my hybrid simile, but still doesn't quite reach the best of both worlds "Freeto" scenario. Still, they are not bad and if you're jonesing for something snacky and crunchy they can fill the void for you. Quantity-wise, you might expect that with a diet food there would only be, like, four of them in a given bag. However, Medifast to their infinite credit actually packs their bags pretty full. I'd say there are 30 or 40 of them, each about the size of a Crunch-Berry, per bag. I'll order more of these and might try the other flavors of puff offered.
As for our "real" meal of the day, after dining on four packet meals, getting to eat real food for supper really gives one an appreciation for how much we all take our food for granted. The real meal is supposed to consist of a meat and three veggies, though the amount of each is entirely dependent on what they are. For instance, I could eat seven ounces of fish, six ounces of chicken or five ounces of beef--which is the weight after cooking. Veggies, too, have different limitations, but usually come in half-cup sized portions. The good thing is that there are Medifast real meal recipes aplenty available online with some pretty tasty ideas for ways to stick to it. (The real victim of this diet, however, is our dog Sadie, who no longer gets to have any dog-taxes from our plates whatsoever, cause damn if we're giving any of our food.)
As of this writing, I've lost 19 pounds since the start. I might be further along than that, but we gave ourselves a day of cheating last weekend because we were meeting old friends for Indian Food and pretty much abused the buffet there in our haste to stuff as much of it into our gullets as possible. But, I feel like I rebounded pretty good from that. And 19 pounds in two and a half weeks is nothing to scoff at. I imagine the loss will slow somewhat, but I'll be content with the 2-5 pounds per week the diet suggests.
Over all I have to give Medifast a good rating. I certainly don't get the variety of food I did with Atkins, but at the same time I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat or if I have the ingredients to prepare it but for one meal out of the day.
The trouble with people on diets, particularly ones that are working, is that it can become a source of obsession. (That's kind of the mindset I've found helps me, at least.) Unfortunately, being in that mindset, the diet and weight loss can become the only topic such obsessed dieters tend to talk about. I know I've been guilty of that in the past. Not wanting to be THAT GUY any more than I already have, I plan to stop. In other words, unless a wildly delicious or heinous new Medifast product worthy of review enters my life or unless I lose all the weight I want (or give up on it altogether) this will hopefully be the last you read about it here.
You're welcome.
Monday, August 3, 2009
The New Program (Pound Four)
As I said, we each ordered a Medifast sampler pack, (which we did using a couple of MediFast coupons we found online, that basically gave us $100 off the total order, which would have been $600 otherwise). If I'd taken the time to see what was included in the sampler pack to begin with I might have skipped the sampler and just ordered individual boxes of meals, but I was dumb and didn't even look at it. The majority of items present in the sampler are in shake or meal bar form. But there are other forms included as well. Below are my general feelings on each category, in case any of you folks are interested in trying them out. (And in case any MediFast online feedback lurker agents are also reading. I say this because after I hinted at two slightly negative words about Suddenlink, a few weeks back, I was immediately contacted by their customer service folks to see if they could assist. Impressive.)
THE MEAL BARS-- these are of the same puffed-soy consistency as many other power and/or meal-bars on the market, only a bit smaller than most. I was used to eating these kind of bars on Atkins, so the transition was no biggie. I'm happy to say they're all pretty tasty. The peanut butter flavor is especially good, as is the cinnamon roll and oatmeal raisin varieties. I'd order all three of those again. Strawberry crunch and lemon meringue are not quite as good, but far from bad and perfectly easy to eat--though I'd probably not order them again just cause I like the first three better. One flavor I had not tried until this morning is the chocolate mint. Chocolate mint is a flavor I don't generally like in real-food and, once upon a time, hated so much that the mere smell of a Junior Mint made me sick. I suspected I would hate them in soy bar form, but I was wrong. Just finished off my mid-morning meal bar in chocolate mint flavor and found it delightful and refreshing, particularly paired with coffee. Would never have guessed it. Overall I really dig the bars and find them to be tasty and filling.
THE SHAKES-- The variety pack came with two French Vanilla and two Dutch Chocolate shake boxes, and one box each of Strawberry, Orange Cream, Banana Cream and Cappuccino. For me, the best of these are the Dutch Chocolate and Cappuccino (which is actually designed to be a hot-drink, though it's perfectly fine cold), which both taste great and make shakes that I can sit and savor over the course of ten minutes or so. I would order both of these again. They're also both great mixed in coffee. Next down the line in taste quality are the Orange Creme and Banana, which are decent enough, but not as much as the previous two. I expected to hate the banana, which I suspected would taste like Banana Runts, but it was actually not bad at all. Don't know that I'd reorder either, but again this is personal taste. The vanilla and strawberry varieties, however, are pretty much of the devil. The strawberry is an especially hateful mix. I liken it to how I imagine it would be to lick Frankenberry's ass crack. It's packed with the same flavor mixture as most strawberry-flavored whey protein mixes I've encountered, which is reminiscent of the Frankenberry cereal, but, by design, without the sugar to back it up. I can only consume this by chugging it while holding my nose and then I immediately have to brush my teeth and gargle with mouthwash. Horrid. Vanilla is only debatably better. It has the standard vanilla flavor of most vanilla whey protein powders, which I can tolerate better than strawberry, but there's something else in there that just doesn't work for me. I have found, however, that it is not a bad base shake in which to add flavors, such as lemon extract, making it taste like a lemon smoothy--which I find to be acceptable though far from "yummy." It's also tolerable when mixed into coffee and is especially inoffensive mixed into chamomile tea. Mostly, though, I just mix it up straight and chug it to get it over with, though even method is problematic. My original theory was to mix the minimum of water into the mix powder so that I wasn't spending a lot of time drinking it. What I got, however, was a concentrated mixture of everything I hated. Experimentation has proven that adding more water than the mix calls for is the better option and is far more palatable. Bottom line, I can't envision ordering more vanilla or strawberry ever again.
THE EGGS--While they're definitely powdered eggs, they're actually better than most other powdered eggs I've encountered in the wild. They're not exactly yummy by themselves, but they serve as a good vehicle for seasoning and are not bad with a little salsa on top. I'd order them again.
THE SOUPS-- We got the chicken noodle and chicken and rice powdered soups, both of which are quite good. Chicken noodle is the best, especially if prepared in low-sodium broth. The chicken and rice flavor is not quite as good, and has kind of a sweet aftertaste to it that I don't care for, but it's certainly not in tolerable. You can also add your own celery, which is counted among the handful of "snack" foods you're allowed to choose from during any given day. (The others are 1/2 cup sugar-free Jello, a sugar-free popsicle, 2 dill pickle spears, or a spoon of dirt. I'm kidding about that last one, but that's what it feels like sometimes. MediFast also offers a number of snack crackers, but none of them came in our sampler box.)
THE OATMEALS-- I initially thought I'd have good things to report about the oatmeals, but I'm afraid I just can't do it. We received a box of maple & brown sugar and a box of apple cinnamon, with a freebie packet of blueberry thrown in. Don't get me wrong, the first bite you take of the oatmeal--whichever flavor, really--is just heavenly and you say to yourself, "Oh, that's really really good stuff. I could eat that for breakfast every day! I'm gonna be just fine on this diet after all." Each subsequent bite, however, offers diminishing returns that can be violent in the suddenness of their appearance, depending on the flavor. Even with that first delicious bite, there's a bitter aftertaste that you may not even notice unless you're looking for it. Then, with each subsequent bite, that aftertaste gets stronger until the final bites are nothing but aftertaste. It's like the flavoring has a half life of about a minute. This is especially true for the apple cinnamon flavor, but to a slightly lesser degree in the maple & brown sugar. (Blueberry flavor, for me, wasn't enjoyable on any level from the start, but I might not have added enough water to it.) In fact, while writing this, I just went and ate a maple & brown sugar (different day from the mid-morning meal of the chocolate mint bar mentioned above) to see if I could quantify what made it awful. It certainly wasn't quite as awful as the apple cinnamon that I ate the other morning, but still far from great by the end of the bowl. Don't think I'll order any more breakfast cereals.
THE PUDDINGS--the sampler came with a box of chocolate puddings and freebie packets of both vanilla and banana. Again, chocolate is best, though kind of slimy in consistency. Vanilla is like a concentrated form of the vanilla shake and not at all to my liking. Banana, which is my favorite flavor of pudding in real life, was not as good as the banana shake. I might order more chocolate pudding, but frankly I'd rather eat Jello.
Now, because we are not fans of a goodly portion of the above meal choices, a week or so back we made an emergency backup order of some of the other non-sampler-pack meals MediFast has to offer. Our goal was to help offset the ones we hate and hopefully find ones we like better that we can order more of down the line. I'm happy to say the experiment was a success.
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
THE MEAL BARS-- these are of the same puffed-soy consistency as many other power and/or meal-bars on the market, only a bit smaller than most. I was used to eating these kind of bars on Atkins, so the transition was no biggie. I'm happy to say they're all pretty tasty. The peanut butter flavor is especially good, as is the cinnamon roll and oatmeal raisin varieties. I'd order all three of those again. Strawberry crunch and lemon meringue are not quite as good, but far from bad and perfectly easy to eat--though I'd probably not order them again just cause I like the first three better. One flavor I had not tried until this morning is the chocolate mint. Chocolate mint is a flavor I don't generally like in real-food and, once upon a time, hated so much that the mere smell of a Junior Mint made me sick. I suspected I would hate them in soy bar form, but I was wrong. Just finished off my mid-morning meal bar in chocolate mint flavor and found it delightful and refreshing, particularly paired with coffee. Would never have guessed it. Overall I really dig the bars and find them to be tasty and filling.
THE SHAKES-- The variety pack came with two French Vanilla and two Dutch Chocolate shake boxes, and one box each of Strawberry, Orange Cream, Banana Cream and Cappuccino. For me, the best of these are the Dutch Chocolate and Cappuccino (which is actually designed to be a hot-drink, though it's perfectly fine cold), which both taste great and make shakes that I can sit and savor over the course of ten minutes or so. I would order both of these again. They're also both great mixed in coffee. Next down the line in taste quality are the Orange Creme and Banana, which are decent enough, but not as much as the previous two. I expected to hate the banana, which I suspected would taste like Banana Runts, but it was actually not bad at all. Don't know that I'd reorder either, but again this is personal taste. The vanilla and strawberry varieties, however, are pretty much of the devil. The strawberry is an especially hateful mix. I liken it to how I imagine it would be to lick Frankenberry's ass crack. It's packed with the same flavor mixture as most strawberry-flavored whey protein mixes I've encountered, which is reminiscent of the Frankenberry cereal, but, by design, without the sugar to back it up. I can only consume this by chugging it while holding my nose and then I immediately have to brush my teeth and gargle with mouthwash. Horrid. Vanilla is only debatably better. It has the standard vanilla flavor of most vanilla whey protein powders, which I can tolerate better than strawberry, but there's something else in there that just doesn't work for me. I have found, however, that it is not a bad base shake in which to add flavors, such as lemon extract, making it taste like a lemon smoothy--which I find to be acceptable though far from "yummy." It's also tolerable when mixed into coffee and is especially inoffensive mixed into chamomile tea. Mostly, though, I just mix it up straight and chug it to get it over with, though even method is problematic. My original theory was to mix the minimum of water into the mix powder so that I wasn't spending a lot of time drinking it. What I got, however, was a concentrated mixture of everything I hated. Experimentation has proven that adding more water than the mix calls for is the better option and is far more palatable. Bottom line, I can't envision ordering more vanilla or strawberry ever again.
THE EGGS--While they're definitely powdered eggs, they're actually better than most other powdered eggs I've encountered in the wild. They're not exactly yummy by themselves, but they serve as a good vehicle for seasoning and are not bad with a little salsa on top. I'd order them again.
THE SOUPS-- We got the chicken noodle and chicken and rice powdered soups, both of which are quite good. Chicken noodle is the best, especially if prepared in low-sodium broth. The chicken and rice flavor is not quite as good, and has kind of a sweet aftertaste to it that I don't care for, but it's certainly not in tolerable. You can also add your own celery, which is counted among the handful of "snack" foods you're allowed to choose from during any given day. (The others are 1/2 cup sugar-free Jello, a sugar-free popsicle, 2 dill pickle spears, or a spoon of dirt. I'm kidding about that last one, but that's what it feels like sometimes. MediFast also offers a number of snack crackers, but none of them came in our sampler box.)
THE OATMEALS-- I initially thought I'd have good things to report about the oatmeals, but I'm afraid I just can't do it. We received a box of maple & brown sugar and a box of apple cinnamon, with a freebie packet of blueberry thrown in. Don't get me wrong, the first bite you take of the oatmeal--whichever flavor, really--is just heavenly and you say to yourself, "Oh, that's really really good stuff. I could eat that for breakfast every day! I'm gonna be just fine on this diet after all." Each subsequent bite, however, offers diminishing returns that can be violent in the suddenness of their appearance, depending on the flavor. Even with that first delicious bite, there's a bitter aftertaste that you may not even notice unless you're looking for it. Then, with each subsequent bite, that aftertaste gets stronger until the final bites are nothing but aftertaste. It's like the flavoring has a half life of about a minute. This is especially true for the apple cinnamon flavor, but to a slightly lesser degree in the maple & brown sugar. (Blueberry flavor, for me, wasn't enjoyable on any level from the start, but I might not have added enough water to it.) In fact, while writing this, I just went and ate a maple & brown sugar (different day from the mid-morning meal of the chocolate mint bar mentioned above) to see if I could quantify what made it awful. It certainly wasn't quite as awful as the apple cinnamon that I ate the other morning, but still far from great by the end of the bowl. Don't think I'll order any more breakfast cereals.
THE PUDDINGS--the sampler came with a box of chocolate puddings and freebie packets of both vanilla and banana. Again, chocolate is best, though kind of slimy in consistency. Vanilla is like a concentrated form of the vanilla shake and not at all to my liking. Banana, which is my favorite flavor of pudding in real life, was not as good as the banana shake. I might order more chocolate pudding, but frankly I'd rather eat Jello.
Now, because we are not fans of a goodly portion of the above meal choices, a week or so back we made an emergency backup order of some of the other non-sampler-pack meals MediFast has to offer. Our goal was to help offset the ones we hate and hopefully find ones we like better that we can order more of down the line. I'm happy to say the experiment was a success.
(TO BE CONCLUDED...)
Thursday, July 30, 2009
The New Program (Pound Three)
Having been off low carb for around a year and a half, I've managed to gain back a good bit of the weight I'd lost. In fact, all of it. And maybe then some. The past three or four months have been especially challenging in this regard, because I found that I've been attracted to eating only crap food that tastes great. Also we bought a grill, which meant lots more hamburgers, hotdogs and steaks (which are not forbidden on Atkins, granted, but are when you serve them with Doritos or a loaded baked potato--mmmm, I could use me a loaded baked potato right about now, with Doritos sprinkled on top). Gradually, all my size 34 pants were been boxed up. Then my size 36s began to feel awfully snug. After I'd popped three buttons off three pairs of shorts in the course of a couple of weeks, I began to suspect that I might be gaining more weight than was absolutely necessary.
The wife, having been off of any program for a couple years longer than me, has also been unsatisfied with her situation. Being a medical professional, she began researching more diet plans and some of the mail-order meal programs to see which one best stood up to nutritional-wisdom. The one she decided she'd like to try was called MediFast. It's similar to Nutri-System and Jenny Craig, only instead of sending you microwavable meals they send you boxes of meal bars and packets containing powdered mixable meals, such as shakes, soups, etc. The program is designed to keep those on it on both a low carb and low calorie eating regimen wherein you only consume around 800 calories worth of food per day while retaining all the body's nutritional needs. Like Atkins, weight loss is achieved through Ketosis, though the high-protein component isn't as strong. Unlike Atkins or many other diet plans, it's not a program you're encouraged to remain on for the rest of your life, but only until you lose the weight you want to, at which point there are methods for transitioning back into regular "real" food meals and a better eating and nutritional pattern, which you are welcome to continue for life if you so choose.
The wife decided to give it a month's trial to see how well it worked. Sensing the challenge, I too agreed to give it a month on the logic that if I hated it I could stay on it until I was in ketosis and then transition into Atkins. But if it was tolerable and worked well, I'd stick it out for the full month and maybe beyond.
We each ordered a four week sampler pack of MediFast meals, which amounted to 20 or so boxes of meal packets and bars. Instead of eating three meals a day, the way MediFast works is that you eat five small packet-based meals per day (powdered eggs, shakes, pudding, oatmeal, soups, meal bars, etc.) and then a single meal of "real" food that has a number of restrictions as to amounts and is vegetable and meat based. Our boxes arrived within four days and on Sunday, July 19, we began the new program.
As with Atkins, the first couple of days were just a beating. Without its regular supply of tasty carbs on hand, the brain starts going all funky and making you feel weak and addle-brained. But that largely cleared up after the first couple day.
Now the program warns that you should weigh yourself only once per week, starting the first day you're on the program. I ignore this, however, weigh every day because, for me, getting that daily "attaboy" in seeing weight drop, even by fractions of a pound, is what helps keep me going. I was astounded, however, at the drop from day one to day three. When on Atkins, you basically expect to lose five pounds by the end of your first five days on the induction phase. On MediFast, I started out at 247.5 lbs and by day three was at 239.5. Granted, most of that was initial water weight as your system gets flushed out--because the meals are loaded with not only protein and nutrients, but fiber as well. At the end of the first seven days, I weighed in at 234.5, a 13 pound loss. And as of this morning, I was at 231 lbs.
Now, as to the tastiness of the MediFast meals themselves, it's something of a mixed bag...
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
The wife, having been off of any program for a couple years longer than me, has also been unsatisfied with her situation. Being a medical professional, she began researching more diet plans and some of the mail-order meal programs to see which one best stood up to nutritional-wisdom. The one she decided she'd like to try was called MediFast. It's similar to Nutri-System and Jenny Craig, only instead of sending you microwavable meals they send you boxes of meal bars and packets containing powdered mixable meals, such as shakes, soups, etc. The program is designed to keep those on it on both a low carb and low calorie eating regimen wherein you only consume around 800 calories worth of food per day while retaining all the body's nutritional needs. Like Atkins, weight loss is achieved through Ketosis, though the high-protein component isn't as strong. Unlike Atkins or many other diet plans, it's not a program you're encouraged to remain on for the rest of your life, but only until you lose the weight you want to, at which point there are methods for transitioning back into regular "real" food meals and a better eating and nutritional pattern, which you are welcome to continue for life if you so choose.
The wife decided to give it a month's trial to see how well it worked. Sensing the challenge, I too agreed to give it a month on the logic that if I hated it I could stay on it until I was in ketosis and then transition into Atkins. But if it was tolerable and worked well, I'd stick it out for the full month and maybe beyond.
We each ordered a four week sampler pack of MediFast meals, which amounted to 20 or so boxes of meal packets and bars. Instead of eating three meals a day, the way MediFast works is that you eat five small packet-based meals per day (powdered eggs, shakes, pudding, oatmeal, soups, meal bars, etc.) and then a single meal of "real" food that has a number of restrictions as to amounts and is vegetable and meat based. Our boxes arrived within four days and on Sunday, July 19, we began the new program.
As with Atkins, the first couple of days were just a beating. Without its regular supply of tasty carbs on hand, the brain starts going all funky and making you feel weak and addle-brained. But that largely cleared up after the first couple day.
Now the program warns that you should weigh yourself only once per week, starting the first day you're on the program. I ignore this, however, weigh every day because, for me, getting that daily "attaboy" in seeing weight drop, even by fractions of a pound, is what helps keep me going. I was astounded, however, at the drop from day one to day three. When on Atkins, you basically expect to lose five pounds by the end of your first five days on the induction phase. On MediFast, I started out at 247.5 lbs and by day three was at 239.5. Granted, most of that was initial water weight as your system gets flushed out--because the meals are loaded with not only protein and nutrients, but fiber as well. At the end of the first seven days, I weighed in at 234.5, a 13 pound loss. And as of this morning, I was at 231 lbs.
Now, as to the tastiness of the MediFast meals themselves, it's something of a mixed bag...
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Monday, July 27, 2009
The New Program (Pound Two)
Following college graduation I stepped out into the real world and began to slowly gain back the weight I'd kept off for the previous two years. I still exercised, but not on the scale I'd achieved in college. Mostly, I blamed this on the fact that there weren't any proper inclines in the Tupelo area, as my old walking path in Starkville was pretty hilly, as well as the fact that I lived on a highway with no shoulder. And my food intake, while not yet unholy, took a bit of a less than "healthy" turn with lots of single-guy rice-based dishes and trips to the never-ending Italian buffet at Vanellis.
After I started dating the woman who would become my wife, my weight gain took an upswing. We were dating long-distance and eating in restaurants a lot, plus, we both just love food. As Barenaked Ladies put it "When we are happy we both get fat." I tried to combat this, for a very brief period, by trying what I was told was the Mayo Clinic diet, but which, it turns out, was actually the legendary Grapefruit Mayo Diet that's apparently been circulating in grubby photocopied form since the Reconstruction Period. It's basically an extreme low carb/high fat/high grapefruit diet designed to put you into a state of ketosis where your body burns fat for fuel. And despite it's questionable origins, it actually does work--though not, in my experience, as efficiently as it claims. I probably only lost around 10 lbs before abandoning it due to my abiding love for French fries.
After getting married, my weight problems only increased. If I thought the Freshman 15 was bad, try the First Year of Marriage 25! (Have I mentioned that my wife is a fantastic cook?)
A couple years later, at the beginning of the wife's med school career, we decided to attempt the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. This was sort of similar to the Mayo diet above, though it involved a lot less grapefruit and two thirds less binging. On the Carb-Addicts plan you essentially avoid eating all complex carbohydrates for two out of three meals of the day, instead eating meats, low-carb veggies and fats. On that third meal, though, you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want in any quantity that you want provided you can consume it within one hour. Naturally, they prefer this to consist of a well-balanced variety of foods, but unhealthy things are allowed as well. Now, I don't remember if it strictly forbids you to spend that hour eating ice cream sandwiches, but if not it probably should. In either case, we found we could eat a lot of food in one hour. The diet still worked for us, at least for the first couple of months. After that, the wife hit a plateau she couldn't seem to come off of and became frustrated at all the salads she was having to eat while the school-club-sponsored free pizza lunches were going on around her on a near daily basis. She quit and it was no fun being on the diet alone so I did too.
A couple more years passed and in October of 2003 we decided to give the low-carb thing another try. I say "we" but it was pretty much the wife's doing. This time she wanted to try the Atkins Diet, which was not quite yet but soon was to become the major fad diet of choice for the nation and the bane of bakers everywhere. In fact, I was only a couple months into it when I began my former blog Tales from the "Liberry," so there are lots of low carb-based tales and rants to be found there. I was wholly against trying Atkins because it struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I'd tried twice in the past and had to give up because certain unnamed people didn't find it convenient to stick to. At the same time, I wanted to be supportive and I also wanted to lose some weight, so what did I have to lose other than the obvious?
The Atkins low-carb method turned out to be a pretty decent program as far as a nutritional lifestyles go. Hell, any diet that lets me eat bacon and cheese regularly has plenty going for it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's very rough seas at the start, because when your body's used to a high carb intake and once you restrict that down to less than 20 grams per day, it rebells. You feel like dazed ass during the first couple of days (or dazed ass with a headache, in case you decide to follow their suggestion of avoiding all caffeine--a suggestion I quickly chose to ignore). However, once your body goes into ketosis and starts burning your own fat reserves for energy, your brain starts working better again and you feel normal. In fact, you feel pretty darn good because empty carbs, for all their tasty-goodness, do tend to clog you up in more ways than one. I liken the feeling to how C3P0 felt after his lube-bath in Star Wars. Also, you lose weight. I lost an impressive amount of weight and quick, peeling off 20 pounds within the first couple of months. I then kind of tapered out into a regular 1 to 2 pounds a week as I settled into the program and found new and more inventive ways to bend the rules of what I was supposed to be eating. (Which amounted to eating more nuts and sugar-free peanut butter and cheese than the letter of the law would allow.) But after the first seven months I'd lost 40 lbs.
There's a lot of confusion over the diet in popular media and word of mouth. You tell someone you're on Atkins and they immediately think and often say, "Oh, so you're eating nothing but meat?" This is patently untrue, at least if you're actually following the program. Sure, there's meat involved, but also a lot of vegetables. In fact, we commonly explained to people that we could eat pretty much anything they could minus flour, sugar, rice and potatoes.
We both stayed on Atkins program for a couple of years. Trouble is, even when we were "on" the low carb diet and doing well with it, it was problematic to remain on it full time. Each year from Thanksgiving through New Years was just a gauntlet of fantastic food opportunities were were hard pressed to avoid. Going off diet for a meal is something you can recover from fairly quickly. Going off diet for a week is much harder to turn around and pretty much requires going back on the two-week induction period. We also always found though that going off diet for any multi-day period of time left us feeling bloated and generally crummy, whereas we felt pretty sweet on the diet itself.
After the wife began her residency, and the copious amounts of hospital cafeteria food (which was actually extremely good stuff) not to mention drug rep lunches became commonplace, she found it increasingly difficult to stay low carb and decided to ditch it. I held fast, though, and remained with the program until 2008, right about the time we moved to Borderland. That was when I basically decided that I didn't want to live in a town with a Biscuit World and Indian Food and have to avoid those delicacies. I also determined I could maintain my weight through exercise alone and joined a local gym.
Of course, I was wrong--or, more accurately, I haven't done NEAR enough cardio to come close to being right.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
After I started dating the woman who would become my wife, my weight gain took an upswing. We were dating long-distance and eating in restaurants a lot, plus, we both just love food. As Barenaked Ladies put it "When we are happy we both get fat." I tried to combat this, for a very brief period, by trying what I was told was the Mayo Clinic diet, but which, it turns out, was actually the legendary Grapefruit Mayo Diet that's apparently been circulating in grubby photocopied form since the Reconstruction Period. It's basically an extreme low carb/high fat/high grapefruit diet designed to put you into a state of ketosis where your body burns fat for fuel. And despite it's questionable origins, it actually does work--though not, in my experience, as efficiently as it claims. I probably only lost around 10 lbs before abandoning it due to my abiding love for French fries.
After getting married, my weight problems only increased. If I thought the Freshman 15 was bad, try the First Year of Marriage 25! (Have I mentioned that my wife is a fantastic cook?)
A couple years later, at the beginning of the wife's med school career, we decided to attempt the Carbohydrate Addicts Diet. This was sort of similar to the Mayo diet above, though it involved a lot less grapefruit and two thirds less binging. On the Carb-Addicts plan you essentially avoid eating all complex carbohydrates for two out of three meals of the day, instead eating meats, low-carb veggies and fats. On that third meal, though, you're allowed to eat whatever the hell you want in any quantity that you want provided you can consume it within one hour. Naturally, they prefer this to consist of a well-balanced variety of foods, but unhealthy things are allowed as well. Now, I don't remember if it strictly forbids you to spend that hour eating ice cream sandwiches, but if not it probably should. In either case, we found we could eat a lot of food in one hour. The diet still worked for us, at least for the first couple of months. After that, the wife hit a plateau she couldn't seem to come off of and became frustrated at all the salads she was having to eat while the school-club-sponsored free pizza lunches were going on around her on a near daily basis. She quit and it was no fun being on the diet alone so I did too.
A couple more years passed and in October of 2003 we decided to give the low-carb thing another try. I say "we" but it was pretty much the wife's doing. This time she wanted to try the Atkins Diet, which was not quite yet but soon was to become the major fad diet of choice for the nation and the bane of bakers everywhere. In fact, I was only a couple months into it when I began my former blog Tales from the "Liberry," so there are lots of low carb-based tales and rants to be found there. I was wholly against trying Atkins because it struck me as exactly the sort of thing that I'd tried twice in the past and had to give up because certain unnamed people didn't find it convenient to stick to. At the same time, I wanted to be supportive and I also wanted to lose some weight, so what did I have to lose other than the obvious?
The Atkins low-carb method turned out to be a pretty decent program as far as a nutritional lifestyles go. Hell, any diet that lets me eat bacon and cheese regularly has plenty going for it in my book. Don't get me wrong, it's very rough seas at the start, because when your body's used to a high carb intake and once you restrict that down to less than 20 grams per day, it rebells. You feel like dazed ass during the first couple of days (or dazed ass with a headache, in case you decide to follow their suggestion of avoiding all caffeine--a suggestion I quickly chose to ignore). However, once your body goes into ketosis and starts burning your own fat reserves for energy, your brain starts working better again and you feel normal. In fact, you feel pretty darn good because empty carbs, for all their tasty-goodness, do tend to clog you up in more ways than one. I liken the feeling to how C3P0 felt after his lube-bath in Star Wars. Also, you lose weight. I lost an impressive amount of weight and quick, peeling off 20 pounds within the first couple of months. I then kind of tapered out into a regular 1 to 2 pounds a week as I settled into the program and found new and more inventive ways to bend the rules of what I was supposed to be eating. (Which amounted to eating more nuts and sugar-free peanut butter and cheese than the letter of the law would allow.) But after the first seven months I'd lost 40 lbs.
There's a lot of confusion over the diet in popular media and word of mouth. You tell someone you're on Atkins and they immediately think and often say, "Oh, so you're eating nothing but meat?" This is patently untrue, at least if you're actually following the program. Sure, there's meat involved, but also a lot of vegetables. In fact, we commonly explained to people that we could eat pretty much anything they could minus flour, sugar, rice and potatoes.
We both stayed on Atkins program for a couple of years. Trouble is, even when we were "on" the low carb diet and doing well with it, it was problematic to remain on it full time. Each year from Thanksgiving through New Years was just a gauntlet of fantastic food opportunities were were hard pressed to avoid. Going off diet for a meal is something you can recover from fairly quickly. Going off diet for a week is much harder to turn around and pretty much requires going back on the two-week induction period. We also always found though that going off diet for any multi-day period of time left us feeling bloated and generally crummy, whereas we felt pretty sweet on the diet itself.
After the wife began her residency, and the copious amounts of hospital cafeteria food (which was actually extremely good stuff) not to mention drug rep lunches became commonplace, she found it increasingly difficult to stay low carb and decided to ditch it. I held fast, though, and remained with the program until 2008, right about the time we moved to Borderland. That was when I basically decided that I didn't want to live in a town with a Biscuit World and Indian Food and have to avoid those delicacies. I also determined I could maintain my weight through exercise alone and joined a local gym.
Of course, I was wrong--or, more accurately, I haven't done NEAR enough cardio to come close to being right.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Friday, July 24, 2009
The New Program (Pound One)
Sorry I've been away. I'm afraid my brain hasn't been working quite at full levels due to a new nutritional regimen I've embarked upon. (Actually, I was out of town for a week and that's just an excuse for being lazy.) In other words: a diet.
Yes, indeedy, Fatty is tired of buying progressively larger sizes of clothing and is, once again, going to do something about it and not just say he needs to and then have another Frito Chili Pie. (Sonofabee, I could use me a Frito Chili Pie right about now.)
I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and have had Oprah-esque crests and troughs with it on a few occasions. I didn't really consider myself to be "fat guy" per se, until college, after the Freshman 15 and the Sophomore 16 set in and I found myself at what I thought then was the enormous weight of 235. Even facing that number on the scale, I was still in denial until my dad pointed out that I weighed the same as he did--and he was a fat guy. Even then, while I did exercise by walking around my neighborhood, I never really committed to any sort of hard core exercise or diet until my scooter broke.
See, somewhere around my junior year (or maybe it was my second junior year) my Honda Elite 250 scooter began acting funny due to something within it having gone amiss. The major symptom of this amissment was that it felt like there was a cement block loose somewhere within the scooter's housing, rocking back and forth, causing the balance to be thrown off with the slightest turn of the wheel. No sir, I did not like this. Turns out, it was something wrong with the front axle, but at the time I felt that I couldn't take it in for repair because A) the one motorcycle place in the area was located three miles outside of town, B) I didn't have a trailer to tow it on, and C) the last time I'd been there as a customer my dad had shown his ass over the difference between the price he'd been quoted on two tires and the price of those tires plus labor, and I suspected my face would not be welcome.
Instead of risking my life further by driving the scooter, I started walking to class instead.
My school was only around a mile and a half away, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to get up half an hour earlier to make the trek. Within a couple of weeks, I began to notice that my clothes were getting loose and I was getting smaller. Not long after this, I did some math and decided that if walking alone was good enough to shed around a pound per week, walking plus eating right would do more. So I adopted a self-styled low-fat diet based on no nutritional foundation whatsoever. I basically ate lots of salad, carrots, celery and chicken. I eschewed dairy products and any food item that had more than 5 grams of fat in it, (though plenty of carbohydrates, I note in retrospect) except on rare occasions when I would take a night off and eat pizza with friends. I went from around 220 lbs when I started to around 170 at my lowest. I also grew my hair out to shoulder length, began wearing contact lenses and Rasta hats and became something of a faux hippie for a couple of years. The whole thing made for a pretty dramatic shift in appearance over a relatively short period of time, so much so that people who hadn't seen me in a few months usually didn't recognize me immediately and would often carry on conversations with mutual friends I was standing next to for upwards of 20 minutes before it finally hit them who I was. And, just like ladies who undergo hooter augmentation often receive more attention from people who otherwise paid little to them before, I also found that people treated me differently, or seemed to pay very different kinds of attention to me than previously. This was deeply satisfying for my ego.
The major problems with my new healthy attitude were twofold. Problem One: I became something of a food Nazi when it came to where I was willing to eat. Again, I was operating from NO nutritional information whatsoever, but became an enormous pain to all my friends all the same because of my unwillingness to eat in places that didn't have a salad bar, or the guilt funks I sank into whenever I did consume fatty foods. (Oddly, I usually dropped weight after eating pizza.) While I probably never quite achieved it, I'm sure there's some sort of eating-disorder I was actively cultivating--not a dangerous one so much as an annoying one.
Come to think of it, a frightening side-effect did crop up once. I once went so long without eating dairy products (my step-mother had stocked the frige with some sort of Vegan fake cheese slices that had never even seen a cow) that something very strange happened to my body chemistry. Within the course of about two days my teeth all began to feel as if they had become very brittle and were about to fall out of my head. It's hard to describe, but that was the feeling I had; as though my teeth were becoming hollow and fragile and might break if I ate a low-fat Bavarian pretzel. I was completely terrified. My friend Joe suggested I might have a calcium deficiency, so I immediately bought a bottle of calcium pills, a full gallon of whole milk and spent a weekend eating cheese. The problem cleared up almost immediately.
Now, I've told that story not only to my wife but to dentists and other medical professionals who should know better and to a one they have all given me a decidedly suspicious look in response. They have also, to a one, gone on to inform me that what I was telling them was pretty much impossible, and then, to a one, they redoubled their suspicious look to imply (or at least be inferred) that I was probably on drugs at the time. As this was not the case, I guess I still have no real explanation for what happened with my teeth--only that it has not happened since.
Problem Two: I began to see how I was becoming prejudiced against overweight people in my own thinking. After all, I thought, if I could lose all that weight, what excuse did anyone else have? I was soon to learn hard lessons in this regard.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
Yes, indeedy, Fatty is tired of buying progressively larger sizes of clothing and is, once again, going to do something about it and not just say he needs to and then have another Frito Chili Pie. (Sonofabee, I could use me a Frito Chili Pie right about now.)
I've struggled with my weight for much of my life and have had Oprah-esque crests and troughs with it on a few occasions. I didn't really consider myself to be "fat guy" per se, until college, after the Freshman 15 and the Sophomore 16 set in and I found myself at what I thought then was the enormous weight of 235. Even facing that number on the scale, I was still in denial until my dad pointed out that I weighed the same as he did--and he was a fat guy. Even then, while I did exercise by walking around my neighborhood, I never really committed to any sort of hard core exercise or diet until my scooter broke.
See, somewhere around my junior year (or maybe it was my second junior year) my Honda Elite 250 scooter began acting funny due to something within it having gone amiss. The major symptom of this amissment was that it felt like there was a cement block loose somewhere within the scooter's housing, rocking back and forth, causing the balance to be thrown off with the slightest turn of the wheel. No sir, I did not like this. Turns out, it was something wrong with the front axle, but at the time I felt that I couldn't take it in for repair because A) the one motorcycle place in the area was located three miles outside of town, B) I didn't have a trailer to tow it on, and C) the last time I'd been there as a customer my dad had shown his ass over the difference between the price he'd been quoted on two tires and the price of those tires plus labor, and I suspected my face would not be welcome.
Instead of risking my life further by driving the scooter, I started walking to class instead.
My school was only around a mile and a half away, so it wasn't too much of a hassle to get up half an hour earlier to make the trek. Within a couple of weeks, I began to notice that my clothes were getting loose and I was getting smaller. Not long after this, I did some math and decided that if walking alone was good enough to shed around a pound per week, walking plus eating right would do more. So I adopted a self-styled low-fat diet based on no nutritional foundation whatsoever. I basically ate lots of salad, carrots, celery and chicken. I eschewed dairy products and any food item that had more than 5 grams of fat in it, (though plenty of carbohydrates, I note in retrospect) except on rare occasions when I would take a night off and eat pizza with friends. I went from around 220 lbs when I started to around 170 at my lowest. I also grew my hair out to shoulder length, began wearing contact lenses and Rasta hats and became something of a faux hippie for a couple of years. The whole thing made for a pretty dramatic shift in appearance over a relatively short period of time, so much so that people who hadn't seen me in a few months usually didn't recognize me immediately and would often carry on conversations with mutual friends I was standing next to for upwards of 20 minutes before it finally hit them who I was. And, just like ladies who undergo hooter augmentation often receive more attention from people who otherwise paid little to them before, I also found that people treated me differently, or seemed to pay very different kinds of attention to me than previously. This was deeply satisfying for my ego.
The major problems with my new healthy attitude were twofold. Problem One: I became something of a food Nazi when it came to where I was willing to eat. Again, I was operating from NO nutritional information whatsoever, but became an enormous pain to all my friends all the same because of my unwillingness to eat in places that didn't have a salad bar, or the guilt funks I sank into whenever I did consume fatty foods. (Oddly, I usually dropped weight after eating pizza.) While I probably never quite achieved it, I'm sure there's some sort of eating-disorder I was actively cultivating--not a dangerous one so much as an annoying one.
Come to think of it, a frightening side-effect did crop up once. I once went so long without eating dairy products (my step-mother had stocked the frige with some sort of Vegan fake cheese slices that had never even seen a cow) that something very strange happened to my body chemistry. Within the course of about two days my teeth all began to feel as if they had become very brittle and were about to fall out of my head. It's hard to describe, but that was the feeling I had; as though my teeth were becoming hollow and fragile and might break if I ate a low-fat Bavarian pretzel. I was completely terrified. My friend Joe suggested I might have a calcium deficiency, so I immediately bought a bottle of calcium pills, a full gallon of whole milk and spent a weekend eating cheese. The problem cleared up almost immediately.
Now, I've told that story not only to my wife but to dentists and other medical professionals who should know better and to a one they have all given me a decidedly suspicious look in response. They have also, to a one, gone on to inform me that what I was telling them was pretty much impossible, and then, to a one, they redoubled their suspicious look to imply (or at least be inferred) that I was probably on drugs at the time. As this was not the case, I guess I still have no real explanation for what happened with my teeth--only that it has not happened since.
Problem Two: I began to see how I was becoming prejudiced against overweight people in my own thinking. After all, I thought, if I could lose all that weight, what excuse did anyone else have? I was soon to learn hard lessons in this regard.
(TO BE CONTINUED...)
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