A year of 5:2, intermittent fasting

By Caitlin Kelly

Occasionally!

A year ago I decided to give it a try — while the truly hard core consume only 500 calories two days of every week, hence the name 5:2.

Here’s my initial blog post about it.

Two days every week, I restrict my intake to 750 calories, sometimes a bit more (800 to 850), and have been doing this consistently for a year.

I can’t tell you how much weight I’ve lost because I won’t get on a scale — it would destroy all motivation if I didn’t like result!

I don’t care if I end up thin; ideally I want to eventually lose at least 30 to 40 pounds.

But friends now immediately notice the difference in my appearance, and my husband, who obviously sees me most often, and most exposed, sees it as well.

My upper body is smaller and firmer.

My face is thinner.

I’ve dropped a band and cup size for my bras.

I now see muscle definition in my calves and arms that wasn’t there, or hadn’t been as visible.

I’m also lifting weight, (30 reps for each exercise, mostly upper body), and take a 45-minute spinning class (i.e. seated bike) twice a week, emerging each time sweat-drenched. That helps suppress my appetite and burn some calories.

I only allow myself alcohol Friday through Sunday.

Fasting isn’t fun, of course! But it’s totally do-able and, after the first few weeks, you’re not ravenous on fast days, just hungry. Big difference.

If you really want to lose weight, and are prepared to make a permanent change to your health habits, this regimen might be worth trying.

I fast on Tuesdays and Thursdays, (although I shift that as needed, when traveling, for example), and friends know it, so we can still meet for a coffee, but not for a meal.

I work alone at home, (with no kids to feed as well), so it’s easy to stock our pantry and fridge with low-calorie foods and drinks, like home-made iced tea, coffee, tea, selzers, things I actually enjoy, so there’s no chance of falling off the wagon: water-packed tuna, low-calorie Wasa crackers, Babybel cheeses (80 calories each), low-fat cottage cheese, fruit, vegetables, low-calorie salad dressings, peanut butter, soup, plain yogurt.

Measuring portions, with a set of tea/tablespoons and measuring cups (and/or a kitchen scale) is essential as is, obviously, knowing calorie counts.

Fast days, de facto, allow very little room for carbs or sweets; a 15-calorie Lifesaver or a few  dried apricots or half a banana or a cup of blueberries or strawberries.

My body feels better– no more acid reflux!

I’m hoping to drop at least two dress sizes by the time I’m closer to my goal. But I’m also allowing several years to do it, not insisting on instant results.

I quickly lost a fair bit of weight a few years ago on a very, very strict diet — so much, so fast that neighbors asked my husband if I was OK. I looked amazing, but was miserable and couldn’t sustain it.

Of course, I soon regained the weight.

This has to be my new life.

Caitlin Kelly, an award-winning non-fiction author and frequent contributor to The New York Times, is a New York-based journalist. Her one-on-one webinars and individual coaching, by Skype, phone or in person, have helped writers and bloggers worldwide; details here. Contact: learntowritebetter@gmail.com.

The challenge of intermittent fasting

By Caitlin Kelly

A great doorway on East 9th Street, NYC

The idea is simple — two days a week you consume only 500 calories; 600 calories for men.

The rest of the week you eat normally, (assuming that “normal” isn’t mountains of chips and doughnuts!)

As someone who’s been trying to shed 30-plus pounds for a decade, unsuccessfully, I’m trying this instead.

I  deeply admire people with the consistent and unyielding self-discipline to weigh and measure every mouthful every day but I’m not that person.

Two days a week? Yes. I can do that and plan around it.

Unlike hardier souls, I’m eating 750 calories on my fast days and, for now, not working out or doing vigorous exercise as my energy on these days is simply too low.

But we’ll see. If I get more used to it, I may.

My doctor knows I’m doing it and she suggested 750 calories, knowing my starting weight.

I’m in my third week of it, fasting Tuesdays and Thursdays.

I also know a few friends who are doing it, so sharing advice and moral support is really helpful, too.

So what’s it like?

Not intolerable, but, for me, tiring and uncomfortable.

It does takes serious willpower and planning and preparation to make sure I have the right foods handy; I work alone at home, so that bit is easy.

I don’t have to care for or feed anyone else, so have no temptation in that respect.

I know all the “right” low-calorie foods and, sadly, hate many of them and won’t eat them — tempeh, tofu, sushi, kale. Please don’t even try to change my mind!

I’ve memorized the calorie counts of some of the foods I like that are also healthy: crispbread (45 per slice), apples (80) and peanut butter (30 per tsp.)

Mornings are easiest — and 3pm is hell!

I go to bed hungry, very grateful to disappear into sleep.

The next morning, oddly, I don’t rush into the kitchen starving. I feel a bit disoriented, wary.

(I’ve never struggled with an eating disorder, so that’s not an issue, as it can be for some people.)

Verboten! Sigh….

I see progress.

 

I don’t own or plan to own a scale. My goal is to be down by 30 pounds by September when I have my annual physical with our GP. Ideally, I’d love to shed 50, but not sure if that’s possible.

My clothes already fit differently, looser. I feel a bit lighter.

100 calories — 1 cup strawberries, 1/4 cup zero-fat yogurt

 

I won’t pretend it’s easy, but it’s definitely not impossible.

9 oz can of tuna; 2 crackers; 1 tbsp mayo, 1 pickle — 215 calories

 

It’s disorienting to not look forward to breakfast, lunch, dinner or snacks or sharing a meal with my husband or a friend. (A treat now is a few Lifesavers, at 14 calories each.)

It means arranging my social calendar, avoiding meeting others when my energy is low and my mood…anti-social. I’m definitely grumpy!

A small salade nicoise: 1 hardboiled eg, 1/2 a tomato, 1 cup green beans, 5 olives and 1 tbsp dressing — 155 calories

 

It does take planning, making sure I have all the foods handy that are healthy, low-calorie and something I enjoy eating — hard-boiled egg (80) or  three cups of asparagus (100.)

I make enormous batches of flavored teas (peppermint, peach, mixed berry) so I have a break from water, selzer and coffee. I drink some diet tonic water for the flavor.

People ask if I binge on “feast” days.

I do indulge in higher-calorie foods (cheese! bread!) and I’m a little shocked by how I do eat, so this has very much sharpened my awareness, and that’s a major step forward.

I tend to eye each mouthful with suspicion, but I won’t freak out about it and am now more likely to split a meal out with my husband and/or bring home half of it to eat on another “feast” day.

I do like the conscious decision to “feast” and “fast.”

It has made me much more appreciative of days when I can eat more — and how it feels to function, let alone work hard, with much less fuel in my system.

I also go to a spin class twice a week and a jazz dance class once a week, plus walking and lifting weights.

Have you tried this?

Has it worked for you?

 

 

 

 

A tale of two cookbooks

By Caitlin Kelly

I love cooking, and cookbooks and folders filled with recipes clipped from everywhere.

I knew Jose, my husband, was a potential keeper when he had the same 1989 cookbook I’ve used for years, and love, written by American ex-pat Patricia Wells, “Bistro Cooking.”

We once had friends over for dinner and the recipe — flambeed chicken with mushrooms — contained the unforgettable phrase “Avert your gaze” for the moment when you ignite the bird. (Or singe your eyelashes and eyebrows.)

Two cookbooks I’m getting to know and enjoy are so utterly different. Even their covers and photos are as unalike — as the British would say — as chalk and cheese.

One, Tamasin’s Weekend Food, is written by Tamasin Day-Lewis, sister of the British actor Daniel Day-Lewis. I have no idea where I bought it — probably on a visit home to Canada, where it’s much easier to find books by British publishers than here in New York.

I love everything about this book, from its silver end-papers to the way it’s structured: Friday Night, Saturday morning, Saturday lunch, Tea time, Saturday supper and Sunday lunch.

I love her elegant assumption, (so not true for us), that one has fled the craziness of city life for a weekend spent with kids and dogs in some crumbling 16th century rectory with muddy Wellies in the entryway.

It has a soft red ribbon with which to mark your place.

I love the photos of her — no make-up, lean-limbed, clutching a bunch of carrots in her blue jeans like some Celtic Scarlett O’Hara, long hair askew. Even on the cover, she’s looking down, not smiling and looks tired.

The recipes, each quirky enough to be interesting, are a mix of humble — home-made bread — and vaguely exotic, like pan bagnat., one of my favorite French things to eat.

I recently — on a weeknight even! — when it was rainy and windy and the night air smelled of woodsmoke, tackled her salmon fishcakes with creme fraiche tartare sauce. All of it made from scratch. She insisted on wild salmon — and, indeed it had a wholly different consistency than the filets we usually buy. The tartar sauce, as promised was “moreish, the sort of thing you have to dip your finger into.” Indeed! It was light, creamy, tart and unlike any gummy, nasty bottled tartar sauce I’ve eaten.

The other book, “The barefoot contessa back to basics” is very American, from its cover image of jolly, not-thin Ina Garten looking into the camera with its perky lime-green lettering, spine and end-papers to the photo of her gorgeous country house — a mansion in the Hamptons and super-elegant kitchen. It was a wedding gift to us from friends who, like us, love to entertain guests.

I like that she includes recipes for cocktails, one of which we served at a brunch for friends — mango banana daiquiris.

I like her list of 10 things not to serve at a dinner party, including garlic and raw onions, nuts and two fish courses. (We now make sure to ask every guest if there is any food they loathe, having once made a fantastic salmon dish at which my friend J [sigh] sniffed: “I don’t eat fish.”)

Not the right answer!

The recipes offer a nice range of choices and the color photos are terrific. I’m looking forward to exploring it further even as, (yes, somehow), I try to shed 30+ pounds over the next few months.

Here is a review of 14 cookbooks that came out in 2013, from Time Out New York, and 12 more from The New York Times. (Several books made both lists.) The one I’m most intrigued by is “Ottolenghi”, by the owner of the London restaurant that bears his last name.

Do you have a favorite cookbook or two to recommend?

If you’re female, read (and share) this please

By Caitlin Kelly

Because the Internet works like that, I saw this blog post thanks to Aby, my male friend in Bhutan.

But then, of course, it made Freshly Pressed this week, in full.

Myrtle Cook of Canada (left) winning a preliminary heat in the women’s 100 metres race at the VIIIth Summer Olympic Games / Myrtle Cook (à gauche), du Canada, remportant une éliminatoire pour l’épreuve du 100 mètres femmes, aux VIIIe Jeux Olympiques d’été (Photo credit: BiblioArchives / LibraryArchives)

It’s must-read material for every girl and woman who worries about her body and whether or not it is thin/shapely/pretty enough.

It is:

Don’t you dare talk about how much you hate your body in front of your daughter, or talk about your new diet. In fact, don’t go on a diet in front of your daughter…

Encourage your daughter to run because it makes her feel less stressed. Encourage your daughter to climb mountains because there is nowhere better to explore your spirituality than the peak of the universe.

Encourage your daughter to surf, or rock climb, or mountain bike because it scares her and that’s a good thing sometimes.

Help your daughter love soccer or rowing or hockey because sports make her a better leader and a more confident woman. Explain that no matter how old you get, you’ll never stop needing good teamwork…

Prove to your daughter that women don’t need men to move their furniture…

Pass on your love of being outside.

Maybe you and your daughter both have thick thighs or wide ribcages.

It’s easy to hate these non-size zero body parts. Don’t. Tell your daughter that with her legs she can run a marathon if she wants to, and her ribcage is nothing but a carrying case for strong lungs. She can scream and she can sing and she can lift up the world, if she wants.

Remind your daughter that the best thing she can do with her body is to use it to mobilize her beautiful soul.

Imogen Heap – Ellipse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If you — like me — have no daughter (or kids), I still hope you’ll share this important reminder with all the girls and women in your life, of any age or size, who long to be told how terrific we are as is.

Not just when we’re sufficiently skinny/pretty/media-approved.

Do you know this amazing song, Bad Body Double, by British singer Imogen Heap?

She describes this toxic, life-long body-image insecurity so eloquently:

Say hi there to my bad body double

This is my bad body double trouble

Oh no, my bad body double, mmmhm

I’ve got bad body double trouble, oh.

She’s trouble

She’s trouble

She’s trouble, alright.

Yeah, yeah

Sometimes I manage to lose her

Shake her at a bar, in the gym for five minutes

It feels so good to be back to my own self again

Can get quite confusing.

We look very similar except she’s got some grays and

A little extra weight on the sides

And dimply thighs,

I hear that stuff’s a bitch to get rid off

(No, no, no, no)

We’re having quite an intimate, personal moment (not now)

Could you maybe come at a slightly less awful time? (not now)

She can see I’ve got someone quite nice here with me

Can’t we just be left alone…

I guess that’s a no then

It’s not just about the calories

By Caitlin Kelly

I’m intrigued by what we eat, why we choose it and how challenging it is to eat (and drink!) very differently if you’re trying to lose weight.

Here’s a link to a new book that explains how major food companies carefully engineer things like potato chips so they are quite literally irresistible.

English: A pile of potato chips. These are Utz-brand, grandma’s kettle-cooked style. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 2002, I gained 23 pounds in one year, stunning both my GP and ob-gyn.

I hadn’t done anything very differently, (no entire-cream-pie-eating-sessions, for example), but two major events had happened in the same six months — I’d started research, and lots of travel, on my first book and my mother (who survived) was found to have a very large brain tumor.

I went out to Vancouver, British Columbia, (I was in Dayton, Ohio doing book research when I learned I had a few days to get there) to see her through the surgery. Oh, and, I’d discovered some cysts in one breast (turned out to be nothing) that was scaring me shitless.

My point is this — if you’d commanded me, then, to count every calorie I was ingesting, I’d have laughed hysterically. Every ounce of my energy and wits was already in play.

Nor did I have much free time to go to a gym or be intentional about weight loss. I was writing a book about women and guns in America, a topic that was sometimes so dark and frightening I got secondary trauma. I’ve never owned a scale, nor am I the sort of person who stares at herself in the mirror every day pinching every excess inch with self-loathing.

But I do live and work in a wealthy suburb of New York City, where the alpha women are all ropy arms, size 2’s in sheath dresses, their calves the diameter of my forearms. And, in America, being productive trumps everything, so we’re all running reallyfastallthetime, tending to the endless needs of our bosses, clients and families, usually in that order.
Oh…..and our needs as well.

I think this skewed order is very much a part of why so many people are so fat. When the only source of real, cheap, accessible pleasure is something in a crinkly bag you can cram into your mouth while driving/commuting/sitting at your desk, you’re going to take the path of least resistance.

If the only thing that day (or week or month) that is going to make you 100 percent happy, (without a fight or eye-roll or endless negotiation with a whiny toddler), is a doughnut (dopamine hit alert!), odds are higher you’ll reach for the easy, quick and cheap holy trinity of sugar, salt and fat than a pious, low-cal apple or pile of celery sticks.

The Thai versions of Lay’s Potato Chips. Most of the flavours are seafood oriented. Why can we not get these flavours in America? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our choices are also deeply cultural. I recently interviewed a senior manager who tried to call a lunch meeting of her staff in Montreal, a city with French values (food matters!) in a nation much more committed to life balance. No one came. I love that!

We are all deeply hungry, throughout our lives, for many things — silence, beauty, kindness, understanding, stimulation, leisure, pleasure, solace. Many of us simply do not have enough of these things in our days, or lives. We under-value them, or refuse to carve out time for them or have made too many commitments to many other people. We’re lonely or bored or overworked or underpaid. Possibly all of these miseries at once!

Food becomes proxy for so many other things we really want but can’t get, often in public moments when we most need comfort or joy: Fries instead of a hug. A Coke instead of a compliment. A bag of popcorn, with butter, instead of ten (six?) hours’ unbroken sleep. A 20-ounce latte instead of 20 minutes’ walk in fresh air with a lovely view.

I’m trying, still, to lose that weight, upping my exercise routine and being more careful about intake choices. So fucking tedious!

English: Snack food (potato chips and the like) vendors at side of church in Coyoacan, Mexico City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Simply counting all those calories doesn’t address the fundamental and challenging issues of every single choice affected by our knowledge [or lack of] nutrition, our limits of self-discipline, our self-awareness, and the limited time many of us have to choose, prepare and consume affordably healthy food.

I did an eight-day silent retreat two years ago and when I re-emerged into the noisy chaotic world I was much more aware how noisy environments made me unconsciously eat more faster.

Food contains so much more than calories!

Here’s an interesting blog post about how we decide what to eat.

Do you enjoy cooking, and/or eating?

Happily Married? Time For Bigger Trousers

Yummmmmm.....Image via Wikipedia

Not surprisingly, people who have found a partner and settled into a happy marriage or life with them, tend to gain weight, reports Abby Ellin — (author of a book on teens and weight loss) — in The New York Times:

Call them happy pounds, love chub or the marriage 15. No matter what, gaining weight during marriage is about as common as holding your breath under water.

A 2008 study in the Journal of Economics and Human Biology examined data from 12,000 men and women ages 18 to mid-40s. Compared with when they were single, the body mass index (or B.M.I., a height-to-weight ratio) of married men increased by 1.5 percent above and beyond what they would normally gain as they aged, and that of women shot up 2 percent.

“Marriage brings along with it social obligations: you eat out more, entertain more frequently, cook meals more frequently, and there’s also an element of being too busy to exercise,” said Laura Argys, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver and an author of the study. What’s more, for better and worse, married couples tend to share behaviors and activities, like snuggling on the couch with a vat of popcorn rather than hopping on the treadmill.

There are also incentives that could explain why the B.M.I. of couples who lived together without making it legal increased by only about 1 percent. If you’re married, the thinking goes, you’re somewhat settled. You don’t have to prove yourself; your spouse will ostensibly love you, all of you, muffin top notwithstanding.

The skinniest I’ve been since moving to the U.S., partnered, living in places that demand driving everywhere and  assaulted by American-style huge portions, was the week my husband bailed and I didn’t eat for a week.

Fifteen pounds — gone! Hot new boyfriend showed up three weeks later.

I’ve been with the sweetie a decade and we are both fighting this weight(y) issue. We love to cook, love great food, love eating out, know how much we make one another happy with a terrific meal shared in a restaurant or cooked well at home.

Other than the obvious, there aren’t a gazillion quick, easy ways to show your love; your hubby can tuck a brownie into his briefcase (or green salad, yes) but which — when homemade — most signals your love?

Breaking the calories = love link is a challenging one. No longer does the sweetie (sigh) bring home muffins. No longer do I bake. But, no matter how beautifully prepared it is, I just can’t get all misty-eyed over yet another bowl of leafy greens with a tbsp. of oil and vinegar dressing.

How do you handle the issue at your house? Have you gained (or lost?) weight when happily partnered?

Why Diets Fail — Boredom! NYT Writer Test-Drives Pre-Made Meals

Here’s one male writer’s frank assessment of what he was buying when he signed up for pre-made meals to help him lose 30 of his 230 pounds:

After online searches and conversations with friends, I decided to compare the offerings of four companies: Zone Manhattan, Chefs Diet, Nu-Kitchen and eDiets. All four would deliver the meals to my door in Brooklyn. Three deliver daily, while the fourth, eDiets, sends a large package once a week. None of the companies knew I was a reporter.

Image via Wikipedia

There were dozens of companies I could have chosen, though it is hard to say how many are in the business at any one time. Research from Mintel International, which studies consumer behavior, suggests that the recession has made all-in-one diet programs less appealing.

“Consumers are trading down to do-it-yourself diets with foods or supplements from the supermarket,” said Marcia Mogelonsky, a global food and drink analyst for Mintel, a Chicago company.

Nu-Kitchen bills itself as the “ultimate personal chef and meal delivery company.” I ordered the five-day plan ($230.53) and was told that I would be sent 1,800 calories a day.

$230! That’s a really good pair of shoes, maybe three on sale.That’s what two of us spend on two weeks‘ groceries, and I eat 2-3 meals at home every day out of that.

What he’s getting for all that cash are three things, all of them helpful although each of them is actually a crutch. He will have to learn to walk differently. And alone. That’s the hardest part:

1) Portion control. My, that’s no food! Look at all that….empty plate. Eating out will never, ever look the same to you again.

2) They build in their idea of variety. Not what you like.

3) They free you from the tedious torture of grocery shopping for only healthy foods, let alone the endless measuring spoons/weigh scale/measuring cup drama that makes you start to feel like every meal should simply be served in an IV tube or maybe a beaker with graduated white lines so you know exactly when to stop.

I’ve been on what I like to call my doctor-ordered LD — Loathed Diet — for almost a month. I can’t tell you how much weight I’ve lost because (yup) I don’t own a scale and don’t want to. I know my own body quite well, thanks, having inhabited it for a few decades and — having been an athlete and dancer for as long — know intimately how it looks and feels. Yes, I look in a full-length mirror every day in very bright light. My body is noticeably smaller, all over, mostly on top. (I’m OK with that).

Once I start cycling and swimming, I hope to shave off even more, faster.

But, you know, when even the doctor who sent me to the dietitian says: “Most people never lose the weight”, honey, where’s my motivation? A little back-patting goes a long, long way to keeping your shaking, quivering hand away from the chips/candies/Scotch/whatever filthy bad thing you love most.

I wish Fred lots of luck but he quickly learned what any miserable fatty learns — 1700 or even 1800 calories a day is nothing! No sweets, very, very few carbs. That does not include — hmmm — doughuts or cookies or cake or pancakes or a margarita. (I get 1 oz. of dark chocolate starting Friday [woo hoo] but only if I sacrifice one of my two daily servings of fruit (1 cup, 8 ounces) or starch (4 ounces, 1/2 cup) in its stead.

Welcome to the nursery!

The sheer boredom of eating the same damn legitimate foods over and over  and over and over — plain yogurt, a small handful of nuts, a small serving of popcorn (but you better make it because it’s drenched in oil) will kill you.

I am only able, I know, to hang in this far because I work about a 2-second walk away from my kitchen and a fridge filled with so much lettuce it now looks like a rabbit’s hutch. The issue with weight loss isn’t just self-control, it’s control in general — over what, where, when and how you put food and drink in your mouth.

Very few of us have $1,000+ a month to spare for someone else feeding us pre-made small portions.

And, yes I can hear all your potato chip bags rustling! Sigh.

The Diet, Week Three: Loose Pants, A Piece Of Toast, Ignoring Cheesecake

Look, but don't touch...Image by AFP via Daylife

Only five more weeks to go.

I went out for dinner on Thursday with my colleagues on the board of a writers’ group. We ate at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, set menu: salad, steak, a piece of cheesecake the size of a foot for dessert. I ate strawberries instead, watching the man beside me dip large, multiple pieces of bread into olive oil. Everyone drank a lot of very good red wine, not allowed to me for another three weeks.

Lessons learned, so far:

You can say no to anything. You may have to say it loudly, and forcefully and repeatedly when out in public or at a restaurant — as I did last night when offered a fistful of succulent (off-limits) Peking Duck. Ditto, the rice.

A teaspoonful of peanut butter starts to resemble some sort of divinity.

Lean protein really makes you feel very full for a long time.

Doing almost no exercise at all (still awaiting clearance post-arthritis flare-up) I see a difference in two weeks: pants are much looser. So (weeps the sweetie) is my bra.

Carrying the right amounts of prescribed food (a measured bag of almonds, a 2-ounce piece of cheese) with you helps when you are so hungry you are ready to eat your arm.

Whining about the rigors of this regime has its benefits — people have been kind and supportive and offered me tips and special low-calorie, low-carb foods I didn’t know about. I now have the name of a friend’s smart, kind nutritionist. She’s in California but you learn to value expertise where you can find it.

Cups of very good tea or a creamy (skim milk) cappuccino are satisfying. They are not a martini or cheesecake, sorry to say, but they are both safely soothing and familiar.

My Diet, Week Two: Dreaming Of Martinis

1.500 calories. Yum! Image by sam sha-put-ski via Flickr

Sitting here drinking my coffee (skim milk, which it always was, no sugar, as usual.) Trying to work up an interest in eating — for the second week — a breakfast of two to three eggs, bacon, a vegetable and a piece of cheese. Eggs have never been a favorite food and after this week ends, I may not eat one for a long, long time.

Friday begins Phase II, with the (re) addition of a tiny amount of carbohydrates and, for the first time in two weeks, fruit. It will be four very long weeks before I am allowed to consume refined sugar in any form — maple syrup, sugar, honey. Thanks to the steroids I’m on for my arthritis, no alcohol has entered my body for weeks. I pass our decanters of Balvenie and Tanqueray with only a brief, pining glance.

Now I really know what food means to me and what its deprivation makes me feel.

Lousy. Angry. Miserable. Controlled. Infantilized.

Shut off from the simplest pleasures of eating out, making a great meal for my sweetie, throwing a dinner party, biting into a creamy piece of Brie or fresh hunk of sourdough. Food is not fuel, to me. By removing its pleasure, and turning it into the enemy, I have had to look food straight in the face and see what it looks like.

We don’t have kids or pets or, really, hobbies. We’re both workaholics, lucky to eat dinner together by 7:30 or 8:00 p.m. most nights. Weekends, as they are for many of us, have been a cherished break with some beloved rituals, whether the blueberry pancakes my sweetie makes for me before I go play softball or the cold Stella or Guinness (one) I drink after the game with all my friends or roast chicken (yes, with skin) I plan and make for us.

A cold, wet, sour 6 ounces of unsweetened Greek 0% fat yogurt is not going to do it for me. Sorry.

Three things sustain me in this world, without which I am not sure life is worth it: ideas, delicious sustenance and beauty. These have been consistent for decades.

I recently blogged here, and had op-eds in two major newspapers, about having been bullied for three years in high school. What I didn’t say was that, every day after school on my long walk home, lonely and battered emotionally, I passed two bakeries. I’d eat something sweet and delicious from the first one and also from the second. The long walk and a high metabolism saved me from gaining weight. Sweet, gooey food was very real, immediate, reliable comfort. (Sorry, not a piece of celery or a low-calorie, low-fat apple.)

As it is for millions.

Losing weight and re-thinking the role of food in one’s life means paying exquisite, unrelenting attention not just to the invisible and delicate chemical balances of leptin and ghrelin and cortisol (that regulate appetite and satiety) but how it tastes and how it makes you feel and how happy your kids or husband or girlfriends are when you cook and serve them something delicious. And drink, whether a creamy cappuccino (still  permissible, thank God, with skim milk) or a stiff G & T (not OK. Shriek.)

I went grocery shopping in a suburban supermarket this week, as I have for the past decade. Obstacle course! Nightmare! It felt like one of those “hellhouses” that evangelical Christians like to create to show sinners the wages of their behavior. Every single aisle was a minefield of easy, terrible choices: chips, cookies, ice cream, candy, soft drinks, fat-laden meats, sugar-added breads, “low fat” yogurts packed with sugar. You practically need a pair of blinders, like those worn by the carriage horses in Central Park that block out all those cars and buses and pedestrians from view, to maneuver through without submission to multiple temptations. Produce aisle, dairy case, lean meat — out!

Eat out, for  a break from those damn measuring cups and spoons,  and you have to keep repeating, over and over: “No rice, bread, corn, carrots, thanks!” Then they bring it to the table anyway.

We ate Indian last night, where they know me, and the waiter — bless him — asked “Gin and tonic?” , my regular. That was tough.

I am now painfully aware how minuscule a “portion” is — go try it — four ounces of wine (as if!); one cup of pasta; 12 almonds.

The only good thing is, yes,  I am already noticeably thinner. I refuse to get on a scale. I’ve had enough humiliation for one lifetime, thanks.

I know my own body and how my clothes fit. I’ve had terrific support and advice here (thanks!) and from friends who have handed me some foods that work for them (Dreamfields pasta) and other tools.

Only five more weeks to go. Then….?

The Diet: Week One, In Which I Enter A Bakery Just For A Tantalizing Sniff

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I’ve never dieted. Never wanted to. The doctor ordered it and for two weeks I have a tightly edited list of foods I am allowed to eat.

No starches (including carrots, sweet potatoes, corn); sugar or sweetening of any sort; no fruit in any form; no rice, pasta or any type of bread. It will modify only slightly over the next six weeks.

Here’s the challenge. If you stay home, and never go out, and are OK with that hermit-like existence, it’s workable as you calibrate every single mouthful, literally, with a set of measuring spoons and measuring cup. Such a fun start to a meal!

If you actually venture into the real world of restaurants and cafes and mass-marketed meals — I just spent two days in Boston — good luck! Salad in a campus cafeteria offered “lite” dressing, filled with high fructose corn syrup (a sweetener) and no bottles of oil and vinegar to substitute. Breakfast in the train station meant grilling the poor people at Cosi whether their eggs were real or powdered; they didn’t know, which was not reassuring. I ate the contents of their wraps without the forbidden wraps.

You wander about in a haze of permanent hunger, food glimmering and glistening all around you like some mirage in a distant oasis: donuts, mountains of muffins, enormous cups of fresh orange juice, a cool, amber glass of beer enjoyed by the guy sitting beside you at the bar as you sip your….Diet Coke.

You start to count the very few people who are not overweight or even morbidly obese, and notice how rare they are, anywhere. Some of them look like the Michelin Man, a belt cruelly tightened across their midriff as if it were a torture device. You wonder if they even have a bossy/caring physician or if their doctor is unkind or unhelpful or has just given up on them.

Your day, if you love to cook and eat and drink and plan the night’s dinner, has lost its focus as food and drink as a source of pleasure are erased. I don’t want a lifetime where food becomes mere fuel, every single calorie a dreaded threat to my existence. Today’s New York Post featured a story about mid-life women, several of them boasting how they are hungry all the time thanks to their minimal food intake — but look hot.

I’ll take tepid and happy…The “reward” for losing weight, the dietitian told me, is…even less food! Tinier portions, because my body will need fewer calories.

This is motivating?

I start physical therapy tomorrow, 45 minutes of pool aerobics to loosen and strengthen my arthritic left hip, which I am assured — and logic would agree — will hasten weight loss by burning more calories.

I am counting the days until I am deemed strong enough once more to get out on my bike, work up a sweat in the sunshine and get back to my Saturday morning softball game. (Two weeks ago, I could barely walk across the room because of the hip pain, which oral steroids have mostly relieved. A hip replacement is in my future, but I am hoping to postpone it for a few years, at best.)

By then, I might gnaw on my glove. Hey, it’s protein.