Day Two: More of the Same--and a Thought

Today's menu:

Breakfast: Peanut Butter Crunch Bar (and coffee)—the breakfast of champions

Midmorning Snack: French Vanilla Shake 

Taste: 5 (not bad. everything good about the banana creme shake is good about this, and everything bad as well; this is essentially the banana creme shake minus the not-unpleasant artificial banana flavor, plus slightly less not-unpleasant artificial vanilla flavor. I happen to like the taste of banana—or artificial banana—more than artificial vanilla, your mileage may vary.)

Fillingness: 4.5

Presentation: 6

Lunch: Chicken and Wild Rice Soup

Taste: 6 (Ah, something new. This isn't bad either—is it open-mindedness or hunger that's pushing me to grade all this stuff on a curve?—but the taste and authenticity of this as being, well, soup are reasonably good. There's actual rice in it, and what passes for chicken—the spongy bits that you find in Cup O Noodles, more or less. Not much by way of flavor, but this can be addressed with third-party spices.)

Fillingness: 5 (Thin stuff, but, eh, it does the job.)

Presentation: 6.5 (This actually looks like soup. Somewhat creamy—or is that "creme-y"—with ornamental vegetables and chunklets of meatish stuff.)

One small issue with this meal—it's probably the  most challenging to prepare of any "instant" meal I've ever seen. Multiple episodes of stirring and microwaving and then re-stirring and re-microwaving, then letting it "cook in its own steam" for 3 to 5 minutes...this is a 10-minute prep job here. So, uh, savor it.

Early Afternoon Snack: More Banana Pudding

Late Afternoon Snack: More Banana Creme Shake

Dinner: Chinese REAL FOOD! Takeout Chicken and Broccoli

I dunno if this blew my diet or not, but my wife was working and I didn't have time to cook...so, I ate around 7 ounces of chicken and all the broccoli from a a local takeout joint. The sauces and preparation (there's gotta be starch in there) probably means this was a no-no, but for f*ck's sake, we live in a real world here and I'm doing my best. 

Oh yeah, according to my scale I've lost 3 pounds already. But this is almost certainly some combination of water and clothing, so yeah, ignore.

Sudden realization: As I made a bottle for my 10-month-old, it struck me that this diet has effectively put him and us on a level playing field. Liquids and mushy solids and the occasional crispy treat? Check. Powdered food that needs to be mixed with water and shaken? Check. Eating every two hours? Check. Someone should just go all the way and create the "Revert to Infancy Diet" and be done with it. Though I'm not sure who'd want a diet that would cause you to double in size over the course of a year....

Day One

One of the things that was immediately apparent about this diet is that you really. Do. Have. To. Eat. Every. Two. Hours. Failing to do so produces a state of hypnotic lightheadedness that, for me, made me completely unproductive. Like, I was dropping stuff on the floor all the time. And I found myself unable to touch-type. Basically, a wreck. 

But as someone used to eating just three (or even two) meals a day, the process of preparing a meal/snack that frequently was itself a bit of a challenge. Even though I work from home, my day is peppered with meetings and deadlines that were conflicting with this biorhythm. More than once, I found myself on the phone as I ripped another package open and dumped it in cold water, then stirred it with a chopstick. (This proved much more efficient than the "shaker" they include with the meal plan. Though no amount of shaking or stirring—James Bond aside—entirely eliminated the powdery residue for some of the meals.

Or should I say, "meals." While some fare fared better than others, nothing I ate felt like a real repast—which might have been part of the point. This is about behavior modification, not just calorie reduction. Every successful diet forces you to consider what you're eating, and hopefully, apply discipline to your intake in a way that extends beyond your weight-loss period into maintenance. Not that it works most of the time...ah, Oprah, we love you anyway.

I'm going to rate Medifast meals on three criteria—taste, fillingness (there's gotta be a better word than that) and presentation, using a 1-10 score. Today's menu:

Breakfast: Peanut Butter Crunch Bar

Taste: 8 (surprisingly, this was one of the better "snack bars" I've had—crispy, light, with a balanced peanut butter and chocolate taste. Seriously, these are better than most of the ones you might buy at your local nutritional supplement store.)

Fillingness: 4.5 (you will wonder where it went, and whether there are any more, and a ghostly voice will whisper, nooooo...)

Presentation: 7 (no better or no worse than most of these things, which tend to look like squared off deer turds anyway)

I will admit I had a cup of coffee with this. You can yank my coffee from my cold, dead hands.

Midmorning Snack: Peach Oatmeal

Taste: 4 (the peachiness is faint, more on the order of sniffing a bar of Body Shop soap than a real flavor. What dominates is the overwhelming library paste texture and bland, gummy flavor of the "oatmeal" itself. This is a mucilage, not a meal.)

Fillingness: 6 (well, you're not hungry after eating it, though it's up in the air whether that's due to its unappetizing nature or its heartiness)

Presentation: 3 (really quite yuck. And if you let it set too long, it stiffens into an even more disgusting material that looks only partly organic.)

Lunch: Chili

Taste: 3.5 (as bad as the Peach Oatmeal, if the two are even comparable. I have to admit that I wonder if I did something wrong here, as the beans seemed undercooked and crunchy while the meatesque slurry surrounding them was rather too liquid to seem like chili. It's hard to imagine that this has meat in it; probably soy particles imbued with essence of flesh. Oh, and it's not at all spicy, so lots of Tabasco is recommended—hell, required.)

Fillingness: 6 (yeah, at least it fills the hole.) 

Presentation: 3 (vile)

Midafternoon Snack: Banana Creme Shake

Taste: 6 (really not bad. The banana flavor isn't authentic to the fruit, but definitely tastes like every other artificially flavored banana product I've ever eaten, and I don't mean that as a criticism. And the shake is reasonably thick, though there's no easy way of eliminating the particulate globules that float around within it (again, no manner of shaking or stirring does that). 

Fillingness: 4.5 (tides you over.)

Presentation: 6 (looks like any other powdered drink you might mix from a packet. Low expectations, easily met.)

Late Afternoon Snack: Cappucino

Taste: 6 (again, not bad—don't expect a foamed espresso wonder here, but if you don't hate "reddi mix" coffees, this is not noticeably worse than the average ones of those. Too bad about the particulate globules.)

Fillingness: 4 (fine for a late-afternoon pick-me-up)

Presentation: 5 (looks rather more like hot cocoa than cappucino, but what are you gonna do)

Dinner: REAL FOOD! 

So, the way this plan works is called 5+1—five packetized meals and one actual meal of food that doesn't require reconstitution. My wife and I headed to the city to try to find a "real meal" that met the strict guidelines (5-7 ounces of lean protein and a few cups of green vegetables). We ended up at Monster Sushi, where we had only appetizers—sashimi, yakitori, a green salad, a seaweed salad, and an oshitashi (cold boiled spinach). I'm sure that the seasonings, such as the dressings and sauces, were forbidden items, but this was Day One for us and we frankly needed a mini-break from the relentlessness of powdered meals.

One thing to note: Because there's so much dietary fiber in these meals, you will find yourself pooping somewhat more than usual. Of course, after a day of eating this stuff, you almost expect to be ejecting a fine spray of powder from the back-end, which reconstitutes into poo in the toilet.

Okay, So What's the Deal?

I was always a chubby kid. Not rotund chubby, but "a few extra pounds" chubby—the kind of chubby that grandmas like but that does nothing for your athletic ability or your social appeal. It wasn't genetic—both my parents are pretty fit, in fact, even now, in their late 60s/early 70s. Nor was it due to excessive overeating (I never much ate between-meal snacks, and have an unusual distaste for sweets in general and chocolate in particular—making me something of an outcast among my peers). I just had an endomorph's frame and a metabolism that leaned towards what Sears Roebuck's called "Husky."

Then, before my freshman year of high school, my parents sent me against my will to an Outward Bound expedition across the Grand Tetons, a six-week trip where we packed in all the food we were going to consume (there was a single resupply at midpoint) and otherwise lived off the land. Hiking a dozen-plus miles a day, eating nothing I couldn't carry (or find), plus several weeks of raging diarrhea due to eating nothing I couldn't carry (or find)—all of that stripped away my husk of huskiness. I ultimately went to college weighing 125 pounds, at five feet 7 inches tall.

I left college 15 pounds heavier, but in fighting trim. And then...two decades and two kids later (yeah, I didn't give birth, but don't scoff at sympathy weight gain, pals, it happens)—I'm now just around 180 pounds.

Now, my wife. She was a jock in college and after—she actually whipped me into shape after we started dating, probably getting me to the fittest I've ever been in my life. But the combination of not having time to exercise and giving birth to two sons has meant she's also been struggling with her weight. In fact, it was her determination to unleash the Nuclear Option—to use some kind of a formal diet system, since moderation and exercise weren't hacking it—that has led us to where we are now. My weight gain was sympathetic; I decided my weight loss would have to be as well. And so, after much research, we decided to try the Medifast diet...mostly because it apparently works very, very well, so long as you can stick to eating nothing but the miserable fare they offer: An assemblage of snack bars, shakes, soups and other just-add-water muck.

Rather than buy the plan from the source, I took some online advice and purchased two large lots of Medifast meals from eBay (where apparently many successful Medifasters unload their unused meals). They arrived yesterday, and I organized the stacks of instant-cocoa-like packages on our kitchen counter, where they're staring at me with barely bated malevolence.

So why this blog? Apparently, diet journals help you stay disciplined. Or at least let you vent your rage. I couldn't find any diet blogs being written by guys, so I thought I'd bring my Y-chromosomal perspective to the party. The journey, and the frank journal of that journey, begins now.

For me: I'm looking to drop 25 pounds, which Medifast claims will take about a month. That means by Valentine's Day, I should be fit as a fiddle, or perhaps thin as a fiddlestick. Don't worry—I'll share exactly what this crap tastes like (and looks like) as I consume it, as well as the general experience of what is looking like a month-long culinary version of "Saw V."

May God have mercy on our souls.