Day Three

I'm doing Medifast.

I'll get the basic information out of the way first, before I reflect on my first three days.

Yes, weight watchers worked, but I was having trouble maintaining, which was disconcerting given that I still had ten pounds to lose. I started to realize that the bad behaviors hadn't gone anywhere, they'd just been subdued by all my hard work calculating points. Don't get me wrong. I love being thin(ner). But I can't calculate points for the rest of my life.

Here's what I realized. When I took a really hard, honest, brutal look at my health, I realized that I know how to eat well. I know what to eat, when, and how much. I know how to control portions, and make good choices. I have in many ways changed my life. However, there's still one thing getting in the way of my success: TIME. Or, rather, a lack thereof.

I love my job, I do, but it's a 12-hour day minimum, with another 10 hours split up on weekend days. When it comes down to it, good decisions take time, and that's time I don't have.

I started researching meal replacements online. It's tough, because most of them suck. Jenny Craig is too expensive, and not effective enough. Even FiberOne bars are actually garbage for you, packed with sugar and very little fiber. I wanted portable meal options that I didn't have to cook and package myself. Which led me to Medifast.

The program I'm doing is called Take Shape for Life, and without writing a novel about it, suffice it to say that it's a health program. My favorite part of it is that the super-strict mostly-Medifast part takes up less than 25% of the accompanying book. The majority of the chapters focus on what happens after you take the weight off, how to change your life and maintain health. 

It's actually quite similar to Weight Watchers, I'm realizing as I flip through the book. The only difference is that, instead of learning it all in meetings, it's all on the page. And the end goal involves changing your thinking about food, rather than calculating points. I have a friend who did Weight Watchers, and can maintain her weight without tracking all her food and points, and honestly, that's wonderful, but I can't do that.

So, I'm in the first phase, which involves eating 5 Medifast meals a day and cooking one meal that's referred to as "Lean and Green." Here's my update so far:

The strangest thing is probably that I don't feel hungry. I'm eating under a thousand calories a day, yet I feel fine. I'm never hungry, and never full. Today I will eat 793 calories. Yesterday was 913. Years of anorexia taught me to survive on very little fuel, but this isn't "surviving." This is "thriving." I feel good. Sweet God that's cheesy. Please forgive me.

All the foods are interchangeable, which is fantastically creepy. It doesn't matter what you eat, as long as  it's every 3-ish hours. I keep being tempted to order all brownies and see if it works. I won't, though.

The food's actually okay. No, it doesn't taste like I'm eating Doritos, but honestly, compared to all the shitty diet food I've consumed in the past 26 years, this is better. If given a choice between Baked Tostitos and Nacho Puff things (I don't remember the exact names yet), I'd choose the Nacho Puff things every time. And the soft serve is great. On a scale of ONE to Angora Cafe sugar free vanilla with peanut butter mixed in, the Medifast peanut butter soft serve is probably a 9. 8.5 at the lowest. And that's compared to the best, the cream of the crop, the mother of all low fat low sugar ice cream.

I should probably mention that the author of the book is Dr. A., and he is featured on the cover in an extremely creepy photo. However, after extensive discussion of this fact, my roommate (who's starting the program in two weeks after ordering her food today) and I have decided that we won't judge him, because he clearly knows what he's talking about. If you join this program, and feel a similarly powerful urge to mock the cover art, let me know. We'll set up a conference call.

Sucks: Tomato soup
Why: Does not dissolve. I'm sure the bullet would do it, but I have enough food that requires the bullet, so I'm returning it.

Sucks: Chocolate mint maintenance bar
Why: too hard to chew, as in "Oh shit ouch I knew there was a reason I stored that chocolate bar in the freezer" but it's not frozen. Returning.

According to the scale, I've lost 4 pounds in three days. I'm going to ignore that statistic, because when I started this, I was a full two pounds heavier as a result of Passover on Monday. Passover, by the way, was epic. I made matzah balls, while my brother made inappropriate comments for five straight minutes, asking how my balls were, and so on. Mom's spicy matzah was epic. All the cooking was, as usual. It was truly one of the best seders, if not the best seder ever. My ten plagues table decorations surpassed all expectations, including my own. I remain the Jew Champion.

--L

PS: When I was walking down Harvard St. in Brookline, an old Jewish man commented loudly that,  "She does NOT look like a nice Jewish girl with her star of David necklace hanging in her cleavage." I took it as a compliment. I looked hot.