Weekly Update #1
This morning Candace and I decided to take the boys to an indoor play park. We knew we wouldn’t make it home in time for lunch so we decided to stop and pick up some food at a fast food restaurant. Since there are very few items on the menu that abide by the manifesto, I went for the side salad, opting for the honey mustard dressing, to hold me over until we returned home and I could eat something more substantial.
After the boys played for awhile, we sat down to eat and I pulled out my very small, very manifesto-abiding bowl of veggies. As I prepared to rip the dressing packet open, the one thing that made me okay with eating a side salad while the rest of my family enjoys hamburgers and french fries, I stop to check the ingredients, just to be sure. Then my eyes settle on the first ingredient on the list and my hopes sink: “high fructose corn syrup”
As I munched on my dry salad I began to realize… this is going to be hard.
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I’ve done diets before. South Beach, Atkins and vegetarian meal plans have all been a part of my life at one time or another so this first week of following the manifesto hasn’t been too painful. Substitute almonds for ice cream and fruit smoothies for sausage McMuffins and I’m good to go. But as with all diets, over the next couple of weeks I’ll grow weary of this and start pining for my old eating habits. I see significant complaining ahead for Weekly Updates #3 and #4.
So I’ve dropped refined sugar and bleached flour from my diet, haven’t had a single soda or cheeseburger in over a week and am quickly burning through the vegetables that have been sitting in our freezer uneaten for months. The other thing I’ve dropped from my diet is the amount of calories I’m consuming. After a few days I started noticing that I was waking up refreshed but barely making it into bed at night out of extreme exhaustion. I had a hunch that I wasn’t eating enough and after I began keeping track of my calories I found I was only consuming around 1200 a day. Quite a bit less than the recommended 1800 to 2000 that I should be eating, especially with the additional exercise I’ve been doing.
Poor planning and laziness were the cause of my self-inflicted starvation. There were several moments of hunger that I would skip since I had prepared nothing to eat. Instead of taking two minutes to heat up some broccoli, I would drink some water and ignore my stomach’s soft pleas for food.
And therein lies a significant issue when switching from eating whatever is available to consuming only healthy, unprocessed foods. Snacking requires actual thinking instead of staring into the fridge slack-jawed until I find something tasty.
What further exacerbated the problem was not planning ahead for the weekly grocery trip. On Monday I declared my new perfect health diet and then made no significant changes to the grocery list. So when I got hungry I didn’t have anything to eat and would just put off eating until later and try to forget about it. Not exactly a well thought out plan.
And speaking of well thought out plans, my forgetfulness has been the bane of my existence as I try to stick to my new set of rules. I’ve forgotten to exercise and frequently checked my email during my daily family time. Old habits die hard.
Finally, after realizing I forgot to drink a glass of wine the night before (supposedly the easy rule), I decided I needed to do something a bit different. On the advice of my incredibly wise wife, I started putting reminders into my calendar. Now at 8pm every night my phone announces it’s time to eat some nuts and drink a glass of wine. At noon my phone asks “Have you exercised yet?”. And when I get home I turn off the computer and put the phone in a drawer to keep from absentmindedly checking in with GMail.
One thing I was hoping to report on were the results of my first physical. The surprising issue I ran into here was how hard it is to find a doctor in my town that is accepting new patients. After calling all of the recommended doctors in town and being turned away, it’s looking like I’ll be giving a second rate doctor a chance this week. Hopefully have something of value to report here next week.
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