You haven't changed a bit!

I had lunch with some old ex co-workers today, and wanted to answer some of the questions they brought up, and figured if they had questions and didn't ask on the blog, someone else might be wondering.

What do you eat?

I'm on the medifast 5+1 (diabetic) plan. The 1 is a “lean and green” meal, which is, basically, 7 ounces of lean meat and some fat, depending on how fatty the meat is, you have a smaller portion size. The 5 refers to the special food from medifast; they have bars (which have slightly more calories), and pouches; the pouches get mixed with hot or cold water, and they have soups, shakes, oatmeal, cold or hot drinks.

You eat the same thing every day?

No, just the same kinds of things; I can have any combination of those 5 medifast meals I want every day. I have an assortment shipped to my house once a month, then for a given day, I eat any five I want. I've had days where they've all been oatmeal, or soup. Only rule is one bar a day; And I've bent that rule if I'm not going to be near a convenient place to mix up the food.

Also, it doesn't matter when during the day I have the meat & veggies. Today I did it for lunch, sometimes I do it for dinner.

How many calories are you taking in?

Theoretically, 800-1,000 calories. Let's check my intake today to see how that matches up. I've had:

• one medifast diabetic bar (140 calories)
  
• one medifast cold drink mix (90 calories)
  
• one medifast soup (100 calories)
  
• one medifast hot drink mix (100 calories)
  
• one medifast shake  (90 calories) (don't get this one for another hour or two)
  
• one snack, a pickle + some low-cal salad dressing (50 calories. Technically I went over on this.)
  
• one “lean & grean” meal. This was at a restaurant, so I'm using Calorie King to fill in some rough numbers here and guesstimate portion sizes.
  
  
  • 9 small pieces of sashimi (183 calories)
    
  • wasabi (20 calories)
    
  • soy sauce (8 calories)
    
  • salad (25 calories)
    
  • unknown salad dressing (170 calories) (!!!)
    
  
  

That works out to 976 calories today. And now that I've checked out a comparable salad dressing, I'll know to ask for it on the side in the future so I can more easily limit how much of it I eat. If I had gotten the salad dry, I would have come in at just over 800 today. Important to look up these calories!

That's not enough, is it?

The plan is that this is enough calories to keep you out of starvation mode, but still force your body to burn the fat stores you've helpfully accumulated for it. I think if I dropped one of the meals, I'd be feeling it. As it is, I get a slight pang pretty much on schedule, go eat, all set.

Yes, but aren't you hungry?

Not really. I eat every 2 to 3 hours. After lastmeal (whenever that happens to be), I usually don't feel hungry, even if I stay up until 2 AM.

You haven't changed a bit?

Sadly, I'd put on weight since the last time I saw these guys, so my amazing 23.5 pound loss so far... basically let me break even as far as they were concerned. Ah well. We'll try again in a month. =-)