Day 21

Morning weight @ 248. I am not surprised.

This past weekend was a yearly event known as "The Lost Weekend". A handful of high-school buddies and I get together over at someone's house and play video & board games all weekend in between handfuls of snack foods and beer with occasional breaks for pizza and burgers. Two days (and a Friday night) of acting like teenagers again. It is glorious. (Or horrifying if you are one of our wives.)

Saturday morning we went shopping and spent $140 on junkfood. I'm happy to report we didn't actually consume all of it though, and I did bring home some stuff that S can munch on during the week and I'll snack on on my feast days.

All in all, it wasn't too bad though, as I had weighed myself on Friday morning and was back at the magical 244. I seem to have plateaued in the lower-mid 240s, so I think from here on out the actual weight loss will slow down. Which I was expecting having read other accounts of similar experiences.

I'm going to try and make an effort to exercise a bit more too. (Read: actually start to exercise.) I'll take the coats off the rack and use it for what it was designed for - elliptical training.

This is gonna be a tough week.

Day 15

Morning weight 241.

Breakfast was a fried egg, 3 B&S sausage (I'm a sausage fanatic, even bad sausage like B&S) toast & coffee.
Packed lunch is a bowl of Z-P soup (hey, it's good!)

Thanks Jen for the comment yesterday! I started to reply, then thought I'd just post my thoughts here.

I did WW years ago... like 20 years ago! Yikes! Did pretty good with it too for the few months I kept it up. Anyway, I seem to recall similar advice. (Jen mentioned that WW advises clients to not weigh themselves in between weekly weigh-ins because daily fluctuations could be discouraging to folks expecting a continual loss.) If my posts seem a bit dramatic in this regard, well, I probably am playing it up just a touch. I expect daily fluctuations, but am surprised at the directions they occur, not if. The scientist in me is rather curious about the correlation between when I'm eating and what my weight is. I find it interesting that after a down day, I typically won't lose anything, but after the following feast day, I'll have dropped a pound or two. A part of me is already considering, if this observed trend keeps up, modifying ADF to something like AMF - alternate meal fasting. Rather than skip eating for a complete day, just alternate meals: breakfast, dinner, lunch, breakfast..., etc. If, ultimately, the goal is to reduce caloric intake, (and in my case, also modify my diet to smaller portions and healthier food choices) then that could still work if you did it 7 days a week.

Of course, after having started to form those ideas... I come off a famine day losing 3 lbs! Haha! Individual data points are totally nuts!

So, while I started this blog as a typical diet journal and a tool to help my resolve, it's also sorta become a lab notebook on my current dieting attempt.

Day 14

Monday morning weight at 244. Famine day. Packed a salad for lunch.

Weekend recap:

Satuday weight was at 242.
Had bacon & eggs for breakfast. I made a bunch of meatballs after cleaning / reorganizing the freezer a bit and grinding up various meat scraps. Had 2 of those as a late lunch. Dinner was some fish & chips and I tried wilting some salad greens in olive oil & garlic as a side dish. Turned out rather nice. Slice of apple pie as a nighttime snack.

Sunday weight was down to 241!
Toast & brown-n-serve sausage for breakfast. Didn't really have lunch, but ate some tortilla chips and Newman's Own Black Bean & Corn Salsa while watching movies. (Also made more of the zero-point veggie soup for the week.) Dinner was spaghetti & meatballs in marinara. We ate late (for us, anyway, at 7:30) so I didn't have any dessert.

So a 3 pound gain over 2 feast days. Not as bad as last weekend, and also unsurprising. I think if I can maintain a net loss of a couple pounds a week in the long run, I'll be happy. This is the beginning of my third week, and so far, I've lost 10 pounds in 2 weeks. And twice this weekend while I was cooking, my pants fell down. Luckily neither of the in-laws were in the kitchen at the time!

Day 11

Friday - a famine day.

Weight holding at 244. Both yesterday and this morning.

Yesterday, a feast day, I went slightly overboard, I guess.

Breakfast was 2 eggs, 2 slices of bacon, and a cuppa.

Lunch was a BLT with 3 slices of bacon and light mayo on a white hamburger bun and a handfull of fresh cherries.

Dinner was some roasted broccoli with garlic and olive oil and a bunch of pot-stickers (dumplings.) And then the last (big) slice of peach pie. I felt over-stuffed and regretted having the pie.

So, yeah, waking up to 244 again wasn't really a surprise. Hell, to be honest, I half-expected to have gained a pound or two. So holding at 244 was rather nice. I'm more disappointed in myself for picking at the dumplings and having the pie. I initially only took 4 dumplings... but kept going back and munching another one here and there. Probably ended up having 7 or 8 of them all told. The pride I felt at lunch after not taking any of the free pizza available from a celebratory lunch was quietly smothered by the shame of no control.


So far today, a cuppa at breakfast and I just finished off the roasted broccoli for lunch, which ain't exactly a 'free' food since I did it with a bit of olive oil. Oy.

Day 9

Back down to 244 this morning after a feast day. That's cool that I managed to drop that back off after 2 days. Still, it would've been nicer if my weight hadn't bounced back that high in the first place!

I deviated from my plans last night for dinner. I ended up making a sandwich out of 2 slices of ham and the rest of the braised greens. A scoop of the carrot salad on the side. And even a slice of FIL's peach pie for dessert.

Famine day today, and so far, only coffee. Packed a bowl of the soup for lunch, and there's still a serving left if I want to finish it off for dinner. We'll see.

I also found a link to a blog from someone who is in the same CSA as we are, and documenting what we're getting every week and offering recipes. Pretty cool!

Eating my way through my CSA

Day 8

Missed posting yesterday, so here's a quick update: Monday morning weight - 248 lbs! +4 lbs in a day! WTF?! I was completely shocked. I'd expected a bit of a gain, maybe 2 lbs back at most... but damn! While I did eat what I normally would on a weekend, I did watch portion sizes and stopped eating when I felt full. Here's what I ate:

Saturday
Scrambled eggs with kielbasa, coffee
Crackers, cheese, and salami
Slice of pizza & 6 wings

Sunday
Cold pizza (2 slices) and coffee
Lunch... wtf I have for lunch?
Baked ham, braised greens, carrot salad, & baked beans

Nothing out of the ordinary. I don't understand.

Monday, Day 8
A famine day, I did eat some zero-point food. I had a bowl of the soup I made on Friday for lunch, and a green salad for dinner.

Tuesday, Day 9
This morning's weight was back down to 246. So that's something. But today is a feast day, and I already started big, stupidly enough - 2 fried eggs and 3 slices of homemade bacon for breakfast. Oy - that will come back to haunt me, but I've been waiting for a chance at that bacon. (I started curing my own bacon last year, and I really have to say, I'll never buy bacon again. Home-cured stuff is so much more tasty. And the thing is, I thought I was out of it until a few days ago when I was rearranging the freezer, and found 2 more big slabs from the last time I made it. Sweet!)

Packed a salad for lunch, and am planning another for dinner along with the braised greens and maybe a tiny slice of ham.

Recipe

So today is a second feast day, it being the weekend, and Independence Day to boot.

Weight this morning @ 244 lbs. That's 10 lbs lost in a week. Pretty cool.

We never made it to the big party yesterday, so I easily avoided all the temptations that were sure to be on hand. Instead, we opted for a quiet weekend at home and ended up ordering a pizza and wings. An All-American couch-potato weekend! Haha! I was happy to discover that after 6 wings and a slice, I was friggin' full. A month ago, I could've eaten twice that before even thinking about stopping. So I'm thinking my stomach has already shrunk some? Dunno. All I know is that it seems to take less food nowadays for me to feel satiated.

I also got to thinking that maybe I'll start posting recipes. After all, the word 'Diet' in the title of this blog could also refer to what I'm currently eating as well as the intended meaning of modifying my eating habits to a healthier perspective. Plus, I love to cook, so why the hell not? And it'll gimme a reason to try and dress this place up with some pictures.

Quick blanch some diced salt pork.

Then drain, rinse, and brown it on medium heat to render the fat.

Chuck in a sliced medium onion. Reduce heat to med-low and sweat that onion down.

Meanwhile, Take a bunch or three of greens. Here I have 2 kinds of collards and some beet greens. (I actually used the 2 bunches of collards, 2 bunches of beet greens, and a 2 handfuls of chopped kale I had left over from the zero-point soup I made the other day.)

Mixed greens all washed and ready to go in the pan. Yes this will all fit. Trust me.

Here's the SP & onion all sweated down and full o' flavor.

And the first half of the greens go right on top. Add ~1/2 cup of veggie stock (I use the stuff from a jar you reconstitute in water,) cover the pan, and turn the heat up to high.

After a minute or two, uncover and toss the greens around a bit. See how much they wilted? Chuck in the second half and repeat.

Again, after a few minutes, they will have wilted down nicely. Toss around some more to help reduce the liquid a bit. Add a bay leaf, reduce heat to low, partially cover, and let braise for about 40 minutes.

Then return the heat to med-high and add a splash of cider vinegar, a few teaspoons of sugar, and a healthy grind of black pepper. Another quick toss around to combine flavors and reduce the liquid, and you end up with:

Braised Mixed Greens

Crazily delicious. Up until about a year or so ago, I would've turned up my nose. My Dad used to make collard greens every now and then, and I remember them as always bitter and slimy. I didn't touch greens for close the 20 years because all I remembered were Dad's. Then I tried some at a BBQ joint and they were a revelation. Now, I try to make them at least once every few weeks. Luckily, the CSA I belong to has been harvesting collard, kale and beet greens the last few weeks, so I've made braised greens twice in the last month.