Week #16 of My Liquid Diet: I Ate Real Food!

The "un-dieting" begins.

The real deal:

• Beginning weight (July 14): 230 lbs.

• Weight at start of Week #2: 222

• Weight at start of Week #3: 218.4

• Weight at start of Week #4: 215.3

• Weight at start of Week #5: 215.1

• Weight at start of Week #6: 211.2

• Weight at start of Week #7: 208.1

• Weight at start of Week #8: 204.3

• Weight at Start of Week #9: 201.9

• Weight at Start of Week #10: 199

• Weight at Start of Week #11: 196.8

• Weight at Start of Week #12: 194.4

• Weight at Start of Week #13: 193.5

• Weight at Start of Week #14: 190.2

• Weight at Start of Week #15: 185.6

• Weight at Start of Week #16: 183.8

• Weight at Start of Week #17 (current week): 182.3

Total weight loss so far: 47.7 lbs.

Fourteen weeks to go.

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Behold the first actual food I’ve eaten since back on July 14, when I began this diet:

I have to say, it lacks the sumptuous gooeyness of the eggs Benedict — from a restaurant brunch in 2021 — that I rhapsodized about a couple of posts ago. Not to mention that recollected dish’s hash browns, ketchup, slice of orange, and parsley as garnish. Even though parsley and I hold a dim view of each other, it did strike me, as I looked down at this little mishmash of a breakfast I’d just made, that a sprig of the astringent green stuff might have visually tied the whole dish together. But I didn’t have much time to dwell on Instagram-ish concerns about how it looked, because I was so eager to, you know, eat it!

So I took my first bite. And I’ll be honest with you: it was something of a let-down.

I mean, it was okay — especially given the limitations that my medically supervised weight-loss plan had imposed on it. In this phase, we’re just starting to “un-diet” — that is, to gradually increase our caloric intake, with the emphasis on gradual. The idea, as I’ve absorbed it, is that after several months of ingesting only 960 calories a day — divided into six 160-calorie meal replacements — if we suddenly went back to eating normal amounts of food our bodies would go, Oh, hey — it must be time to get back up to that weight we started at. Which is a terrifying prospect. In fact, as I was walking home the afternoon before Back-to-Real-Food Day, I had a kind of waking nightmare: I suddenly worried that I’d somehow gained back all the weight I lost. My panicking made no rational sense. My pants and belt — four inches smaller than when I began the diet — hadn’t exploded off of me. My T-shirt — now a mere Large, after decades of XL-osity — still hung rather loosely over my partially shrunken tummy. But my idea of myself — of the (pre-diet) size I “really” am — had briefly re-conquered my conscious mind. When I got home, I somewhat sheepishly told Sara about the body-image hallucination I’d experienced on my walk, and she assured me that all those lost pounds hadn’t jumped back onto me. And yet the next morning, as I prepared to step on our bathroom scale, I momentarily worried that it would beam my pre-diet weight back up at me. (It didn’t — yay.)

One hundred fifty calories of pre-scrambled protein, plus a few spices.

All this emotional turbulence was over a mere 90 additional calories! For my daily Meal #2, I was substituting this 250-calorie scramble for my usual 160-calorie strawberry-flavored protein shake. Every two weeks another diet “product” will be replaced by slightly more calories of real food. This process of incremental un-dieting is supposed to tell your body, Hey, that weight-loss was real! This smaller me is the new normal. Don’t try to supersize me back to what I was before!

Another reason for un-dieting: the people who run this program have learned, through the experiences of the thousands of dieters who’ve gone through it, that if you just stay at 960 calories a day for the whole 30 weeks, at around this point (Week #16 or 17), the diet tends to stop working. It’s as if your brain decides, after months of you eating so little, that what really must be going on is that you’re starving. Like, maybe your food supplies are running out! So your body begins to shut down, slowing your metabolism to the point that you won’t lose any more weight. To use a Yiddish word that my father would exclaim in frustration when, say, the elevator in our building broke down yet again, your brain says, Genug! Enough! But if, instead, you start eating just a tiny bit more each day, apparently your brain lets your body keep burning off the pounds: Oh, he’s just still dieting, not starving. The whole thing seems counterintuitive, but hey, I’ll take it!

Can it taste a bit better, though? To slightly misquote the late Richard Nixon, I’m not a cook. The only parameters set by the diet are that the meal consist of 150 calories of protein, 50 of non-starchy vegetables, and 50 of fat. The program strongly urges us to eat the same meal at the same time each day — so I’ve chosen (selecting from a list they provide of suggested foods for each category) a breakfast of two eggs, scrambled with two cups of veggies (spinach, mushrooms, and onions), and half a tablespoon of olive oil. With some emergency help from Sara on my first day of cooking, I added some chopped-up dill, along with seasoning (salt, pepper, thyme) and what I thought was a cube of frozen garlic but turned out to be a cube of frozen ginger (hey, the packaging is incredibly similar!). It was still kinda bland.

Fifty calories of veggies and 50 calories of olive oil await the future.

Unexpectedly, even given its undeniable blah-ness, eating real food made me immediately want … more real food. My brain, experiencing eggs again, longed for them to be accompanied, as they had in the olden days, by toast. And jam. And also a side of potatoes. Plus more coffee — lots more — than the eight-ounce serving I’m currently allowed twice a day. (The doctor says that too much caffeine would cause my hormones to go haywire, triggering hunger pangs — though maybe she’s just in thrall to Big Sanka.) In other words, the specter of Pre-Diet Me — which had been so terrifying the day before this first real-food breakfast — was agitating to be released from its shackles: More! More! More! To which I had to reply, Genug!

And I did. As I must, if I want to successfully complete this diet — and then, afterwards, navigate the wide world of food in a sensible, sustainable, even enjoyable way. Because Genug! doesn’t just have to be a term of defiance: Argggh, enough! It can also be one of acceptance and gratitude: Enough. I have enough. Thank you.