I Have Begun My Liquid Diet
No real food for the next 17 weeks. Yikes?
This is my first Substack post that has absolutely no food powering it. Feels weird. To be honest, I’m nervous as hell about it. Can I still write when I’m not eating actual food?
On Thursday afternoon I went to the Fabiola Building (my all-time favorite name for a medical facility — don’t we all want to feel Fabiola?) to pick up my first two weeks of “product” and get checked in by the Kaiser Medical Weight Management Program.1 Every two weeks I’ll be going there to get two weeks’ worth of the stuff I’m eating and drinking. I’ve been calling it a “liquid diet,” but that’s a misnomer: there are shakes galore (three flavors — vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry), but there are also bars and soups. We get six “meals” a day, spaced about two to three hours apart — and we can pretty much mix and match the shakes, bars, and soups however we want. Each day we’re ingesting 960 calories — which isn’t much, which is the point. These products are said to provide me with all the nutrients I need — with the exception of Vitamin D, which I’m taking in pill form.
At the Fabiola, I paid for my first two weeks in the program, and they gave me two heavy shopping bags filled with the products I’d ordered, along with a binder, a shaker (for blending powdery stuff), a book about lifestyle change that I have promised myself I will actually read (even though I truly don’t want to), and some exercise bands (it’s really important to do strength training on this program, so your muscles don’t melt away along with your fat).
At the medical intake, a nurse took my blood pressure and had me hop up on a weird scale-like device that measured all sorts of things along with my weight: Body Mass Index, percentage of fat, and some acronyms that I don’t yet understand:
While I was at Kaiser, I met a young woman who was just making the transition from the initial, 17-week-long stage of the program to the next one, when you gradually start reincorporating real food and increasing your calorie intake. She said that if you begin the program with the right attitude, it isn’t that hard. The woman was so upbeat that a great weight — a psychic one, in this case — seemed to lift off of me. As my wife drove us back home, I felt hopeful.
Now here I am at Day 3, and so far it’s been going okay. The shakes taste fine. The Fudge Graham bar has the taste and consistency of dirty sand, and whoever concocted it should do time. However, the Peppermint Cocoa Crunch bar is slammin’ — delicious and gratifyingly chewy. The Creamy Chicken Soup is bearable; the Tortilla Soup should be shot out into space. The cool thing is that every two weeks I can adjust my upcoming order, so eventually I’ll just be ingesting the products that I like the most.
Besides writing these posts, the thing I was most worried about was how the diet might affect my live performances. I’m doing my solo show Citizen Brain every Saturday, and I’ll be performing four other shows over the next four Sundays. It takes a lot of energy to do these shows, which range from 90 minutes to two hours (with an intermission) in length. Yesterday was my first performance since starting on this diet — and all day I had these fevered visions of collapsing onstage. But the show went fine! I felt totally normal — full of energy and excitement.
This experience reminded me that however food-powered I may be, way more than that I am audience-powered. Audiences have been saving my life for over 30 years. At each of the thousands of performances I’ve done, I’ve always had more energy afterwards than I had going in. I suppose it might get harder as I get deeper into this diet — but I don’t think it will. In fact, as I get thinner I may well get more energetic! Hell, if I keep getting more live gigs and taking off more pounds, I might start having to run marathons, just to unwind!
Okay, I’m getting carried away. It’s only Day 3, after all! Still months to go before I taste real food again. But so far, so good.
And now I’ve written my first foodless post! Thank you so much for ingesting it, so to speak.
I am receiving no money from this program to write about it. In fact, I’m paying them a bunch of money to participate, as the costs aren’t covered by my Kaiser health plan.
Yes, you could run a marathon! My husbands father, whose only exercise was walking the dog, decided at 64 that he wanted to start exercising instead of going downhill year after year. He started running and improved enough over several years to run the New York, Boston, and Berlin marathons. It can be done! (But after you’re eating solid foods) Let us know.
Good luck, Josh. I got my rude awakening a few years ago when informed that I was pre diabetic. As one who has always had a reasonably healthy life style, I was shocked to imagine myself as a diabetic. Since then I have changed my diet after much reading and found that I can actually enjoy my new foods (predominantly vegetarian) and no longer crave some of the things that used to be mainstays in my meals. I had to learn how to cook differently, using many new foods and spices, so that I really enjoy my new diet and do not feel that I am making any sacrifices. I’m sure that if I didn’t really like what I’m eating, I would eventually slip back into my old patterns.