After feeling like I’d been fighting a plateau, this week’s diet was different than previous weeks. Instead of maybe having one small cheat, I had a few cheats. I cheated on four dinners and two lunches, having meals from McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s (mmmm Baconator), and my favorite Mexican roach coach… among others. I didn’t give up on the diet, I was just trying to shake my body out of the diet rut it seemed to have entered.
I went a little beyond what I’d planned. I planned to cheat until Thursday, but let myself cheat into Friday. Bad, bad Greg. But the idea was to cheat more than just once and in fairly rapid succession, then go back to some of the stricter rules from the outset of the diet.
For example, when I started the diet, I’d cut myself down to two cans of diet soda a day, trying to drink more tea and water. But in the last couple of weeks, I’d been letting myself drink anywhere from 4 to 5 cans of diet soda a day. So I cut back there.
Another thing was that low carb flatbread. It had become a mealtime crutch. Almost every day, one or even two meals would consist of a flatbread, some cheese, and some lunch meat in a sort of quesadilla. In the beginning, it wasn’t affecting my weight loss, but when I ate that, I didn’t have to think as much about incorporating fresh vegetables or vary my diet as much. I think that monotony and cutting down on my consumption of fresh veggies gradually contributed to the plateau.
So, this weekend, I ate more low carb. Lunch generally had some celery and bleu cheese dressing incorporated as a side dish. Saturday’s dinner was some thin-sliced rib-eye I got at the Korean market which I marinated in a mixture of lime juice, lime zest, curry powder, fresh mint, fresh ginger, salt, and a little oil. I tore that into smaller pieces and sauteed it up with some red onion and sliced garlic, then served it with tomato. My wife and son got it on bread as a loose meat sandwich. I had it without the bread.
I had some leftover meat, so I browned that up all by itself on Sunday morning and made flatbread quesadillas with it for Sunday brunch. Sunday dinner was savoy cabbage sauteed with garlic, yellow and green onions, and some kielbasa, quickly braised with a little chicken broth and a pinch of white vinegar, then hit with some lime juice at the end to brighten the flavors. Didn’t come out quite how I wanted. It was edible, but nothing I’d do again. Still, it provided a lot of veggies.
I also got more exercise this weekend, so that probably helped too.
I’m going to continue the soda restriction and the attempts to include more veggies while backing off of the flatbread quesadillas. Hopefully that will help deliver some good numbers for next week. And this week’s numbers, while not staggering, still put me at an average of 3.5 pounds per week over the 7 weeks so far.
I can live with that.
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