Sunday, April 25 -- Week 17, Day 1

This diet is based on an average of 1200 calories per day for women. There are add-ins for men and children, but the man and children in my house aren't following this book, so I'll not bother mentioning them. The intro says that they kept seasonal foods in mind when preparing the menus, so I opted to start at week 17, instead of starting at the beginning of the year, because this is the 17th week of the year. Already, I've made some adaptations. For amusing reference, I will include the original menu, then tell you what I actually ended up eating.

BREAKFAST:

Original:
• 1/3 cup prune juice
• 1 scrambled egg w/ chives + 1 tsp. imitation bacon bits
• 1/2 english muffin, toasted
• 1 tsp. margarine
• 1/4 cup skim milk
• coffee or tea

My adaptation:
• 1/3 cup apple juice
• 1 over easy egg
• 1/2 english muffin, toasted
• 1 tsp. butter
• 1/4 cup 2% milk

Prune juice? Blech. I am not an egg eater, but I love runny tepid egg yolks (no whites, please!) And I'm not going to bother buying skim milk. We're already buying 2 different kinds of milk, no need to add a third. I figure the extra 30 calories or so from 2% as opposed to skim isn't going to hurt anything. And I don't like coffee OR tea, and there's really no nutritional value in either (right?), so I don't see the point in forcing the issue.

At the same auction that I got this book from, I also got a lot of cute little juice glasses. They are so tiny that 1/3 cup juice doesn't look totally pathetic in them! Oh - back to the egg. I knew full well that if I only ate the yolk, I would be starving five minutes later, so I opted to choke down the white, like it or not. This way, I could put off my future starvation an extra three minutes. I didn't have to choke it down. It wasn't so horrible. Not my favorite, but I could certainly do it again.

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LUNCH (this is a good one...):

Original:
• 3/4 cup homemade vegetable broth
• Pineapple Flounder
• 1/2 cup steamed broccoli
• shredded red cabbage topped with alfalfa or bean sprouts and lemon juice
• mineral water with twist of lemon

My adaptation:
• 3/4 cup homemade vegetable broth
• salad with deli meat and cheese
• 1/2 cup carrots
• water

Here are the vegetables about to go into the oven. Pretty, aren't they? I had already exceeded my grocery budget for the week before I was able to find flounder, so there goes that for this week. We had ordered pizzas last night for dinner, so everyone else finished that off, along with breadsticks and carrots. I chose to skip the broccoli this time. Maybe later in this adventure I'll be more ready to try it, but for today it's just carrots. And regular salad with deli turkey, cheddar cheese, and chow mein noodles, as well as regular water both work just fine for me. I liked the broth! It was pretty spicy, I assume from the celery? It was odd drinking broth out of a cup, but after one spoonful, I realized eating it with a spoon was going to be very inefficient, not to mention annoying (slurping).

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DINNER:

Original:
• cheese pizza pocket
• carrot, celery, and green pepper sticks
• tossed salad with 1 tsp. vegetable oil plus wine vinegar
• 1/2 cup low-calorie jello
• 3/4 cup milk

Adaptation:
• Pretty close – I used a different dressing, and found that I just don’t like celery

A cheese pizza pocket is just ricotta, diced tomato, parsley, green pepper, parmesan, oregano, garlic powder, salt, and pepper in a pita pocket and baked until the cheese melts.

So I consider day one to be a success!