The diet verdict

I love food.  Fast food and slow food.  Fancy restaurant food and street vendor food.  Elaborate Julia Child food and nuke it in the microwave food.  I was one of the pickiest eaters ever as a child (ask my mother), but I grew out of it.  (By the way, that's why you should not freak out if you have a picky eater.  By the time your kid is out of college, I promise he will eat more than chicken nuggets and string cheese.)  Now I love trying new foods, making new foods, cooking food for others.  

So, when the hubby said he wanted to go on a diet, I was a bit skeptical.  If he goes on a diet, I have to go on a diet, because it's not very wifely to devour pizza and hot fudge sundaes in front of someone eating lettuce.  However, he found not just a diet, but a whole meal plan, grocery list, and recipe booklet here and asked if I wanted to try it.  I liked the idea of whole foods and preparing more foods at home.  It was all spelled out - buy this, cook it on this day, use the leftovers in this dish the next day.  Some of the recipes looked pretty good.  We decided to do it, and today is the last day of the two week challenge.

Overall, we liked the meals.  We actually enjoyed replacing sugary sweets with fruit and almond butter.  We modified the plan a bit - we continued drinking coffee and rearranged the order in the second week - but otherwise stuck with the principles like no soda, no bread, no processed foods, no red meat.  I felt like we ate a lot of eggs, and that got a little old by the end, so I made extra smoothies instead of omelets.  We had to buy a LOT of greens in the first week - and that was just for the two of us - and that caused some refrigerator space issues.    

The verdict?  Despite one of the worst weeks of sleep ever due to a sick baby, I have had energy and did not even take a nap today when I could have.  I'm down ten pounds, and he's lost even more.  I would love to make a loaf of bread (and probably will sometime soon), but we're definitely going to continue eating this way.