Please, Sir. Can I Have Some More Cottage Cheese?

So, for the past eleven days, Robin (my way-better half) and I have been on a diet. My first diet in 36 years of existence, in fact. It's not like I am a fatty-fatty, but I do have a little bit of a tire in the middle that forces me to wear kinda baggy shirts now and then. As you know, I do love the pizza and burritos. But, don't worry, I still have the long, skinny, chicken legs capped off by a lack of cushioning on the backside. It would be ideal if I could just rearrange the extra flesh, but alas...

Anyway, we were turned onto this diet so aptly named the "Idiot-Proof Diet". The appeal is that they pretty much guarantee that you will lose 9 pounds in eleven days. Another plus is that it is not a starvation diet. You are allowd to eat till you are satisfied, but not full. Lastly, they have a vegetarian/vegan version and I seem to be a sucker for anything that is a veggie-friendly version of a non-veggie food. Our freezer is constantly packed with various mock-meats since I feel it necessary to support any company who makes the effort to acknowledge us as a valid market.

The catch of this diet is that you are told exactly what you can eat, and it is fairly lacking in variety. You get four meals a day that can either be categorized as protein or carb meals. Each meal is usually one type of item and that is all you get, although you get as much as you want as long as you don't fill up too much. Some days it is almost all protein meals, somtimes all carbs, and occasionally there is a mix. I think the point is to keep your metabolism guessing, which keeps it running on high.

Day one (Monday) was quite a start. I was stuck in a 5-hour meeting at work when they brought in about 10 pizzas for lunch. PIZZAS!! DAY ONE!! Didn't anyone get the memo? I sat there and grumbled into the first bowl of cottage cheese I have ever eaten. Since then we have gone through THREE LARGE TUBS of cottage cheese a the house. If I never have another spoonful, I'll be good.

By day three (Wednesday) I was grumpy if anyone talked about food around me and I already had lunch plans for the following Friday to go to Anthony's as soon as the diet was done. Then I went to work out on day four and got on the scale. I had lost four pounds in three days. Wahoo! I could do this.

Let me get this straight for other first-time "idiots" trying this diet. Weekends suck! You are allowed only one glass of wine a day. What's the point? One glass makes you want another. The second glass either makes you want a third or makes you want to sleep and it isn't till the third or fourth do things really get good. Not to say that we need to get boozed up to enjoy the weekend, but if we are gonna go out on a Friday or Saturday night we are either going to eat or drink. We spent our Saturday night at the Super Target. I bought four pairs of boxers and two new pillows.

Just when I thought, "you know, this ain't so bad. I can do this for a while longer," the mother of all bad-days-to-be-dieting hit. Halloween. I had bought six bags of bite-size candy bars. Two bags each of Snickers, Reece's cups, and Kit-Kats. I was thinking that we normally don't get a ton of kids to come by, so I was already thinking ahead to day twelve when we could tuck into all the leftovers for breakfast.

I didn't count on the weather. A big reason we don't usually get a lot of trick-or-treaters is that Halloween in Denver is quite often a wet, cold, even snowy event, and most of the kids do their begging in malls or they just stay home. This year it was a gorgeous day and was still fairly mild well into the evening. My optimism sunk around 7pm when I had to dig into the second half of the stash. They didn't stop and they kept coming in huge groups. Normally I would be thinking "what a cute little kitty," or "that sure is a scary vampire". This time I was only grumbling about my dwindling cache. I think we have about five mini-candies left. Good think those Kit-Kats break in half easy, otherwise Robin would definitely be on the short end of that deal.

Now it is day eleven of an eleven day diet. As of early yesterday, I had lost 7.5 pounds. Part of me wants to see if I can gain it all back in the following three days. I think I have a good menu mapped out to do it primarily made up of sugar and cheese sandwiches on white Wonder bread. Ideally, they suggest to do the diet for eleven days, cheat for three, then start another eleven. The claim is that the three-day break actually helps your body break fat down faster in the next set of eleven. Like I said, I am pretty sure I will need more than a three-day break to willingly put another bowl of cottage cheese in front of me.

G