ridiculous diet fads

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Cravings

Do I write about anything besides food? Is this a thing where I have A Serious Problem and I am just breezily unaware of it? I’m hoping it’s just Keto, which forces me to think about food waaaayyyyy more than I want to, and way more than is probably healthy.

Right now is my food witching hour. Well. Witching Hour #1. (The second takes place after Carla goes to bed when I flop onto the couch and watch something ridiculous.) This is the period of time between when I am starting to get hungry for dinner (about 4:00/4:30) and when we actually EAT dinner (anywhere between 6:30 to 9:00, depending on my husband’s schedule and/or my ability to time the dinner correctly). 

(This is also some sort of mating witching hour for a local… chipmunk? bird of some sort? other creature that makes repetitive clock-ticking – but, like, a loud cuckoo-style clock-ticking sound, not a tiny click that a normal wall clock makes – noises every single day at right about this time?)

(Well, now whatever it is has finished his business and has moved on. Soon the neighbors will release their dog into their backyard where he will bark persistently until they let him in. Which takes MUCH longer than it reasonably should.) 

Anyway, I am typing this post right now to avoid snacking. I have already snacked on my Allotted Keto Snack, which is an ounce of cheddar cheese, and which was delicious. I have been doing Keto for one week and two days and it has been going fine – you know, as fine as it goes when you hate it and all food seems super sad and/or requires too much chewing. But today I have been smacked right in the face by Severe Cravings.

Maybe if I write them down here I will transfer some of the craving energy from my belly into the Internet. That’s a thing, right? Like how if you post about your baby sleeping through the night, she is guaranteed to wake up seven times the next night and for every night for the next three months? Maybe it’s like that with cravings: I tell you all about them, and then they disappear. Yes. That is going to happen.

At some point, I hope to have a relationship with Keto that is less restricted. Where I can take little breaks. Or even… eat regular amounts of carbs on the weekend or something. I don’t know. But right now, everything feels very fragile and precarious, and I’m worried that one rogue glass of wine is going to tip me right off the wagon and into a bag of tortilla chips.

(Here is where I note that this weekend, we have not one but TWO [outdoor, masked-except-while-eating] family get togethers [of the exactly three families we have gotten together with since March, these are two of them] and so I am already sure that I will be pretty lenient with myself. My husband is making these amazing cookies, for one thing, and for another, we will be watching football [outdoors, on their deck; I don’t understand how this will work either; do they have an outdoor TV?] and football goes so very well with beer. Maybe I will take some Michelob Ultra with me?)

(Also: TWO get togethers??? That seems so incredibly extravagant. But it is also coming at a good time; this is the anniversary of my friend’s death and I am feeling wan and tearful, so being with other friends should be a lovely and welcome distraction.)

I am slightly surprised by the things I am craving most fiercely; for one thing, “chips” is not up there. Not that I’d throw a plate of nachos out of bed, mind you. But I have other carbs on the brain.

  1. Bagel. This is my top food fantasy right now. A thick bagel, soft on the inside, crunchy on the outside, perfectly toasted. Coated in a slick layer of butter with salt and a nice gooey topping of honey. Oh my GOD. 
  2. Wheat thins. We have a box in the pantry and I ate one this past weekend and it was SO GOOD and I have been thinking about gobbling up its brethren ever since.
  3. Triscuits. We also have a box of these bad boys because I was eating cheese with Triscuits all summer when I needed a little pre-dinner snack. So now when I eat cheese, there’s a Pavlovian Triscuit bell that rings in my head.
  4. Apple anything. A nice, crisp, juicy apple. Apple cake. Apple crisp. Apple pie. ANYTHING WITH APPLE.
  5. Mango smoothie. I think this is a spite craving and will be therefore fleeting; I made a smoothie today with raspberries but before I did that, I looked up how many carbs mango would set me back and it was A LOT. My raspberry smoothie left a lot to be desired, so I have been really jonesing for the mango version I used to make for myself and Carla on nights she had ballet.
  6. Bruschetta. I would love a nice crusty baguette, sliced into pillowy rounds, and coated with wonderful things like spinach and artichoke dip or a mushroomy tapenade. YUM.
  7. Garlic bread. Droooooooool.

I thought for sure I would really want pizza, because I love pizza with all my heart. But I have been making a Keto version (with fathead dough) and I guess it is an adequate-enough stand-in that I am not missing pizza too much. (Yet.) (Adequate is the absolute highest praise I can give the fathead pizza dough. I think all the people who say it tastes just! like! regular! dough! have either been on Keto for too long or have never eaten really good pizza.)

I would also love a big glass of Sauvignon Blanc. And a Coke. 

I have thinking about Coke so intently today that I may temporarily suspend my “no artificial sweeteners” rule and drink a Coke Zero. We’ll see. 

What are you craving right now?

Thank you for joining me on this cravings journey. It is now time to put my dinner in the oven and feel resentful toward our neighbors and their dog who has, right on cue, begun to bark in their yard.

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Keto Update (Sorry) Plus Dinners This Week

I promised I wouldn’t talk about it a lot, and yet here I am, talking about it immediately after I made that promise. Well. Feel free to skip straight to the meals below if you want. Or to skip reading altogether and come back in three months when I will be DONE with this.

It has been one week and two days and I can officially say that I hate the Keto plan. It is miserable. I am miserable. I feel constantly nauseated – a low-level nausea that has persisted since I finally made it past the absolutely dreadful “Keto Flu,” which I would say lasted until Friday and consisted of constant nausea, terrible headache, full-body aches, and brain fog. I hate eating and cooking, which makes me deeply sad because I love eating and cooking. I am irritable and snappy, particularly just in advance of meal times. I am constantly on my phone – looking for recipes, trying to figure out what I can eat and how much, logging my stupid water intake. My brain is absolute mush – I cannot remember ANYTHING, I am clumsy, I am flaky. I am peeing ALL THE TIME because a) you are supposed to drink a lot of water, so I am, and b) because I am constantly thirsty. My jeans are not fitting any better. My joints hurt. I have no extra energy. I get restless legs in the evenings, which – for me – can only be treated with sleep. But then my sleep is fitful or interrupted (I woke up at 3:00 for NO REASON the other morning and then couldn’t fall asleep for ninety minutes). Which, of course, could be related to Current Events (evergreen statement), but I am fine with blaming everything bad on Keto. It is torture. Purely voluntary, I can literally quit at any time, torture.

HOWEVER. I have already shed 6% of my body weight. In one week. I would love, in my WILDEST DREAMS, to lose 20% of my body weight. But I would be happy with 15%. And it seems like I am on my way to achieving that goal if I can just hang in there. A friend, yesterday, told me my face looks thinner. (Before you try to beat him up, please understand that he KNOWS I am doing Keto and prefaced his comment by saying, “I really don’t know if I should say this, because I have a policy of never commenting on people’s bodies, but I know you are putting in a lot of work…” And I said, “Go ahead, say it.”) Anyway, I would prefer that my thighs looked thinner (not that I want anyone to comment on my thighs, literally ever), but face is good, I guess. Well. Good, but not my favorite compliment.

(By the way, if it were just me, I would not mention that I am doing Keto to anyone in real life. It makes me super uncomfortable to give people a reason to look at me, and evaluate my size and shape.) (SUPER UNCOMFORTABLE.)

If the pace of weight-loss continues, then I will count this awful, awful, horribleness a great success. But I reserve the right to stop AT ANY MOMENT because it truly is awful. My poor husband hates it, if possible, even more than I do. And he wants to quit So Badly. I keep wheedling him to power! through!, because I am DEEPLY HOPEFUL that there is some kind of Keto inflection point that we just need to cross… and then it will be fine.

Maybe this is like when you start a new exercise regimen. And it hurts and you hate every minute and you dread dragging yourself out of bed to do the exercise. But then you start seeing results, and it becomes worth it. The pain feels like a challenge. You start to look forward to exercising. Or, at least, it becomes more automatic rather than something you have to gear yourself up for. This is what I hope Keto is like. The novelty wore off and now we’re in the thick of it and we just have to keep our heads down and move forward because RESULTS.

To drag this topic out even further: it is also really hard to talk about Keto around my daughter. I try to be open about what we are doing and, instead of talking about desired weight loss, focus on how we are using this method to recalibrate our eating habits. We’d been eating too much of the foods that you need to eat in moderation, and so we are trying to reset the way we think about portion sizes and food. I am also trying to explain to her that we are adults, and fully grown. She, on the other hand, is a child. And her brain and body are still growing and changing and so she needs a wide variety of ALL foods, even those that we are avoiding. Also, I am trying to keep a close watch on my language: instead of saying, “oh, I can’t eat that brownie,” I will say, “I am not going to eat that brownie” or “I am choosing not to eat that brownie right now.” To make it clear that it’s not TABOO or BAD, just not something I am choosing to eat right now. This is more important when it comes to things like mango and blueberries, which are HEALTHFUL, GOOD FOODS. And yet they are foods that my Keto app tells me get an F. (Bacon gets an A.)

Okay, this is way more than I wanted to type about this hellbeast of a diet. Now, it is time to post about dinners. Which I really don’t want to think about, let alone eat. Anyway, here’s my sad, defeated, TOTALLY VOLUNTARY meal plan for the week:

Dinners for the Week of March 2-March 10

  • Peri-Peri Chicken with Roasted Zucchini

Note: Peeps, this is simply a chicken breast marinated in peri-peri sauce. (Which is delicious, if you haven’t tried it.) And then some cut-up zucchini tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper. I am craving nothing but vegetables, and I could not resist the siren song of the zucchini at the grocery store this weekend. They are carb-heavy – two small zucchini eat up 20% of my daily carbs – but I DON’T CARE. I need vegetables. (By the way, if it’s not clear, two small zucchini is not my desired amount of zucchini. I want to eat two LARGE zucchini. But this – my stereotypical-American perspective on what constitutes an appropriate portion size – is part of the problem I am hoping to address with Keto. Maybe two small zucchini is, in fact, a more appropriate amount.)

 

  • Taco Salad

Note: I can’t even get it up for taco salad. It just sounds like a lot of chewing.

 

Note: This sounds like fat overload. I wonder if I can squeeze in some sort of salad on the side?

 

  • Leftovers

 

Note: There is absolutely no way this will taste like regular BBQ sauce.

 

Note: If there’s no good looking halibut, I might use cod or sea bass instead. 

 

[Edited to add: OMG I forgot about planning something for dinner Sunday. I am telling you, my brain no longer functions.]

Note: Hell, maybe we will throw this diet out the window and go gorge ourselves on chips and beans at our favorite Mexican place.

 

Tell me about all the delicious meals you are eating this week. Especially if there are vegetables involved.

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Dinners This Week

After a VERY frustrating month and a half of trying to lose any, any at all, of the weight I gained from eating my feelings all autumn (and, simultaneously, a month and a half of reminding myself that weight has nothing to do with my self-worth and that maybe I am just This Size and should embrace it and worrying that I am setting a bad example for Carla by “dieting” and churning with ALL of the Fraughtness that comes with wanting to be a certain size in our society today and facing a truly insurmountable resistance to buying myself new jeans), I have persuaded my husband to try the Keto plan with me. This is literally Day Three, so please understand that I may give it up any second now and never speak of it again. (I mean, no carbs I can sort-of live with… but NO SAUCES? No BEANS? And the limit on Healthful Vegetables – like, I typically have to restrict myself to two cups of LETTUCE!!!!! to stay within my carb allotment – has me in a panic.) (I understand that I am CHOOSING this, by the way.) (I don’t really plan to speak of keto/diet stuff, that often, but it may shift the tenor of my weekly dinner plan posts and/or the tenor of my general complaining, so I am warning you about it now.)

Anyway, meal planning is newly challenging because I am trying to emphasize fat and protein over carbohydrates. Here’s what’s on the menu this week:

Dinners for the Week of February 24-March 1 (WHAT. HOW IS IT MARCH ALREADY SLOW DOWN TIME OMG)

Note: There were some absolutely beautiful tuna steaks on sale at Costco this weekend, so I snapped them up. We will not be eating the sautéed red pepper portion of this meal; instead I will be sautéing some green beans. This is because I already have the green beans and I don’t want to waste them, not because of some red-pepper-related bias.

Note: I fully realize that the Internet has been swooning over this recipe for eons. I have read about it with suspicion for many years and NOW is finally the time to try it out.

 

 

Note: I haven’t figured out what I will pair with this yet. Maybe some avocado?

 

  • Leftovers of some sort or possibly eggs

 

  • OUT

Note: My birthday is this week, so we will be going out to celebrate. I am already feeling grouchy about not being able to eat all the things I want to eat — solely because of completely voluntary and self-imposed restrictions! — but I think we have found a restaurant that serves some nice fish options. And the whole point of doing Keto is to reset my eating habits, so a little limitation on the all-out scarf-fest I would otherwise be doing on my birthday is probably not a bad thing.

 

What’s on your menu this week?