My new diet - with vacation breaks
My wife Renate and I love food and wine, we love to entertain - and we love to travel. Therefore a cruise fits pretty good what we like. The problem with my love for food and wine is that I have to loose some weight. I want to loose some weight until May 1 that I look great when walking my daughter down the isle on her wedding day. That gives me the motivation to go on the South Beach Diet again and I have scheduled it to begin on February 9, 2010. Nine years ago, when my wife gave me a huge Viking gas grill for my 50th birthday, we went for about half a year on the Atkin's Diet. That worked out pretty fine, but we slowly gained weight again after we left the diet.
Why do most diets fail? Because you do not like to stay on. Therefore when we started on the South Beach Diet in 2005, we made one important chage to the diet - we grant a vacation once a week for two days. It is much easier to stay on a diet for a long time, when you do not have to do it all the time.
How does my changed diet look like?
For Breakfast, we always have two eggs, nothing more, nothing less, only two cups of strong black coffee (life starts after the second cup of coffee).<br>
Here we have only very few exeptions, even after we discontinued the diet three years ago. NO bread and NO organge juice is very important. One exeption is Valetines day I will prepare for my wife a nice breakfast with French bread, smoked salmon, and a glass of bubbly (or two) just after we come back from church. Sometimes we break the diet Sundays after church when we go for breakfast with friends.
For Lunch, we usually try just to have some salad and cold meat (leftovers from the night before as I am usually grill too much) or fish (tuna or salmon in a can or sardines). We just add a very easy to make dressing of virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar (Costco offers a great balsamic vinegar in 1 L bottles for around ten dollars).
For Dinner, we often grill on my gas grill some meat or seafood and have some salad or vegetables.
NO alcohol during most diet days, only on the two vacation days + one of the diet days we can have two glasses of red wine.
When we have lost the weight we want, we will relax the diet even more and allow us some fruit and a glass of wine every evening. To allow the fruit means usually that we eat some fresh berries and also eat yocurt that we make with berries (we taw frozen berries in the microwave), add the yocurt and pomgranate juice. This is a fast and healty lunch.
What do I change compared to the official South Beach Diet?
First of all there are three steps in the diet. The first two weeks are very strict and allow absolutely no carbs. Sorry, I tried that, but it is impossible for me. It is better as you loose much more weight that way. Then comes a little bit relaxed handling of the diet (but I stretch it even more), where you can eat from time to time some carbs and some fruit. If you go to a steakhouse and they do not offer just vegetables or you really want a baked potato, eat it with a lot of butter. This slows down the spike of sugar in your blood. Avoid carbs and sugar (and sugar substitutes, which are bad for your health according to the health newsletter I receive). Once you lost your weight you can switch to a more relaxed state just to keep the weight. My problem with my last two diets was that after two or three years I stopped my diet. But read the way I am changing my diet to make it possible to stick with it. I will let you know if I made it to just below 200 pounds on May 1, 2010 for my daughter's wedding. Today, February 9, the beginning of my diet I have 216.2 pounds, so about 16 and a half pounds to loose.
Two days a week we grand us a vacation from the diet. There are events at the chambe of commerce, or at church, or an invitation from a friend where it would be difficult or impossible to follow the diet. It is no problem if you are going to a steak house, like Outback, where you eat a steak and vegetables and have a salad before. SKIP the bread and NO beer, not even during Happy Hour, where you get two for the price of one. If we want to have some bread or French fries or beer, we count that day as a diet vacation day. Usually we take this vacation for the weekend, if nothing else is scheduled.
On the vacation days we drink wine or beer, eat pasta (that is what I am missing on the diet) or potatoes, rice dnd whatever carb we want. So life is good even when dieting. You need a vacation to relax every year, so does your diet!!!!
Speaking about vacations, tomorrow I will talk about my last cruise on MSC Poesia, my 21st cruise. Today I wrote enough already.
Christian Bellingrath