Hey! I got your attention! You may never have even been to this blog before, but you clicked because you’re interested in losing weight (or because you’re family and you read all of my stuff anyway). Swimsuit season is almost here and my wife and I decided that it might be a good idea to drop a few pounds.
After extensive internet research, I came to a few conclusions:
Everyone wants to sell you a miracle thing that will guarantee that you will lose weight – right now, most of them contain acai.
The best way to lose weight is to eat less and exercise – unfortunately that takes a bunch of time to work.
There are a lot of medically questionable fad diets. Some of them sound really unhealthy – the others just sound icky. Really, a pound of bacon for breakfast??
Just about all diets will work, it’s just that some are easier to put up with than others.
After a lot of reading, we decided that the South Beach Diet looked like a good idea, so I ordered the book from Amazon (used ones are cheap) and we read it.
How the South Beach Diet works:
You start off for two weeks on a very restricted no carbohydrate regimen. No carbs – none. No bread, no sugar, nothing with flour or any kind of grain. The book says that this two-week period is necessary to rebalance the way that your body deals with carbohydrates. Personally, I think it’s just an idea to increase book sales. After a week without carbs, you’ll likely start ripping pages from the diet book itself and eating them with olive oil just to get some starch in your tummy. The book has a menu for that first four weeks – every meal is laid out. It even tells you what kind of snacks to have. Mozzarella sticks (string cheese) is a staple of the Phase One snack list. MMmmmmm. Yummy rubber cheese…
No alcohol, either. It seems that alcohol is converted into sugar by your body, and that’s a bad thing.
My lovely wife has been cooking every single meal in the book, following the recipes to the letter for almost two weeks. The food is pretty tasty, really. They go to a lot of trouble to make the food look and taste appetizing. When you’re starving, even cold tomato soup with vegetables (gazpacho) looks and tastes good. Seriously, Monica has been going to a lot of trouble to get this stuff right, and we’re almost through our two weeks of no-carb hell. We finish on Wednesday. Neither of us has cheated – we haven’t even eaten one page yet.
Does it work? Sure, in just ten days, we’ve each lost about three kilos – that’s about seven pounds. We’re on track to make the 8-12 pound weight drop that’s typical for Phase One. After Wednesday, we begin Phase Two. I don’t know much about Phase Two, because most people perish of hunger before they reach it.
Actually, in Phase Two, the diet is a little less restricted, and we’re allowed some carbohydrates. It’s rumored that we get to eat some fruit and stuff. I’ve been tempted to go look at the book to find out what we get to eat in the next phase, but I’m afraid that I see those pictures of yummy fruit, I might just go looking for the olive oil…..
More to come….
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