Recently, I’ve had some pretty good success with losing weight. Sadly it has involved amputation.
Just kidding. I’ve been losing weight due to what I eat. Or, more accurately, what I don’t eat.
I’ll start my (average) weekly diet that I’ve been following for a while with my favorite day:
Friday
Friday Breakfast Menu: All the coffee I want! (no cream, no sugar)
Friday Brunch Menu: More coffee! (no cream, no sugar)
Friday After Lunch Workout Meal: Coffee. (no cream, no sugar . . . seeing a pattern here?)
Friday Late Tea: Coffee. (again)
Friday Dinner: Friday night we normally go out. That’s when the fun begins. Habitually, I make the glamorous switch to iced tea (unsweetened). While this may sound daring, it’s nowhere near as daring as . . . the appetizers. Generally we have something fairly low carb, like calamari. Mmmmm. I’ll have a salad, a low carb vegetable like broccoli, and then a huge ribeye. The Mrs. and I will share some wine with dinner, and generally a little more when we get home.
Saturday
Saturday Breakfast: Mmmm, coffee! But this time fresh ground good stuff.
Saturday Lunch: Varies from nothing (50% of the time) to a low carb whatever.
Saturday Dinner: This varies as well.
We have what is known as Gourmet Night.
The Mrs. and I were fans of the television series Hannibal. For those of you unfamiliar with the show (which is most of you since ABC summarily cancelled their best show ever), it follows the career of Hannibal Lecter, a serial killer and cannibal. It’s a great family show.
The show is particularly good at showing Dr. Lecter making dinner. And in the scenes in the show where he’s in the kitchen with the food processor and a cut of meat, well, it is a show about cannibals. You can’t help but wonder exactly what (or who) Dr. Lecter is having for dinner.
The scenes on the show, however, are shot in such a vivid, crisp and cinematic way and the food looks so wonderful on screen that it inspired The Mrs.
Since we have been having Gourmet Night, she’s made intricate dishes like Beef Wellington, Beef Bourguignon, and, last Saturday, it was ribeye covered in a cream mushroom sauce. Oh, and a nice Chianti and some fava beans.
The Mrs. isn’t alone in her culinary inspiration from that show: Hannibal inspired a cookbook.
I must state that no neighbors have been harmed in the making of any dish at Wilder Gourmet Night.
If Friends and Hannibal had an ugly baby, it would look like this.
Sunday
Breakfast: Coffee.
Lunch: Coffee. Sometimes eggs and a breakfast meat, like smoked alpaca.
Dinner: Something from the grill – steaks, burgers, brats, chicken, ribs, brisket. The big Atkins cheat of the week is generally here – grilling and BBQ go with ice cold beer. Hey, I don’t make the rules. Mojo does:
Monday
You know the drill before dinner. Coffee.
Dinner: Either leftover BBQ meat, or, more generally, a salad. Like a lettuce salad. Some ranch or, more recently, lots of hot sauce and a little ranch. Perhaps some torn up sandwich sliced chicken. All the carbonated water I can drink.
During the weeknights there isn’t any alcohol. As Mark Twain said,
Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.
But he didn’t live to be even 150 years old, so what does he know?
Tuesday
Coffee. Again. I bathe in it. I put it in my armpits for deodorant. I rub it in my hair for conditioning. I place it on my face for moisturizer. I use coffee grounds to brush my teeth.
Dinner: Salad (as above) and/or an Oscar Mayer® Portable Protein Pack. I know, I know, they are horribly expensive for the amount of calories you get in the Portable Protein Pack – but part of what I’m paying for is willpower. I had one. I can say “Stop” that’s enough.
Sure, I could make my own, dice some ham and cheese, but the pre-packaging is just enough to say, “You’re done here, John Wilder.”
Am I hungry, especially during the week? Sure. But I’m surprised sometimes at just how full the two ounces (that’s sixty-five kilograms) of the Portable Protein Pack will fill you up.
Also, all the carbonated water that I want.
Wednesday
See Tuesday.
Thursday
See Wednesday.
You might think that on a diet like this, I’d be hungry occasionally. No, not at all.
I’m hungry ALL THE TIME.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration. I’m rarely hungry after a nice ribeye. And coffee is much more filling than you might expect and also has the good side effect of doubling as my personality. Also, your stomach shrinks, and it takes much less food to satiate (JohnWilder® Certified ACT Word) your hunger with a smaller stomach.
As far as skipping meals?
Starting in sixth grade, when they stopped making me eat lunch at school, I stopped eating it. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Never been all that interested in eating breakfast on a regular basis.
And, when I do eat breakfast or lunch, I don’t get less hungry during the course of the day, I get even more hungry and my hunger at dinner is even larger. And, when I’ve had to work long (12-14 hour days) for a long duration (weeks), and they bring in lunch every day? I’ve eaten lunch for the energy burst. And, also the pants waist size increase, because who doesn’t want to gain weight. I mean, they make bigger pants, right?
My mathematical formula relating lunch to weight loss looks like this:
- Lunch once a week? I can lose weight.
- Lunch twice a week? I can maintain weight.
- Lunch three or more times a week? I can expand like the Russian Empire. I start covering my
FrenchFreedom Fries with mayonnaise and capitulate to the forces of metabolism and gravity.
When I’m working human length hours at work, however, I’ve learned that hunger actually isn’t strong enough (in the small amounts of it that I feel) to drive me to cheat on my diet. That’s what wine is for.
“One piece of pizza surely won’t hurt,” says the wine.
Every person (by now, at my age) knows someone, or more likely multiple people, who have had gastric bypass surgery. I’m not going into detail on the surgery, but after reading up on it, all I can say is I’d prefer the diet that I’m listing up above. The people who I know who’ve had surgery have said nothing but good things about it, and I’ve seen a man lose so much weight so fast he looked like a candle on the black dash of a 1998 Toyota Corolla® in the Sun. Literally, a candle melting inside the corona of our Sun, or so Jim Morrison told me.
But surgery sounds like much more work, pain, and much more cost than simply eating a lot less.
Besides, who needs surgery when I have all the coffee I can drink?
Before you go and jump into even considering this, GO SEE A DOCTOR! I’m just telling you what’s worked for me and my results. If you think this is good advice, write down JOHN WILDER KNOWS NOTHING 453 times in cursive. Please, take responsibility for your own decisions, heaven knows someone has to.
