Lean Cuisine Challenge, Post No. 1

An integral part of Operation Portugal involves serious starvation. Starvation may be a strong word, but for those who know me, I am an eater. I love food. I obsess about it. Even eating food involves plots, codas, stanzas, and final acts. My mother was an amazing cook, so my addiction was well "fed" from the get go.

But now I find myself comfortably north of 30, and my once insane metabolism has decided to become... lazy. So my food obsession is in need of an overhaul. That is where the Lean Cuisine comes in to play. If you haven't tried them lately, you should. They have every variation of food imaginable... in portions smaller than most elementary schools serve. What I have learned in my brief love affair with the Lean Cuisine is I used to eat WAY TOO MUCH FOOD.

Here is how the "diet", or as I like to call it, "life change" works. Katherine and I eat a small breakfast (1 packet of oatmeal for me, similar size bfast for K), 1 LC for lunch, one LC for dinner w/ a side of vegetables. All cravings are satisfied with a Diet A&W or Diet Sunkist (diet sodas have come a long way people). My caloric intake for the day is usually around 1200. With the treadmill, that means I'm only consuming between 900 and 1000 calories a day. I do get hungry, but the pounds fly off! What's more, I'm training by body to accept the correct amount of food. I sit at a desk all day, I don't need much "fuel" to do that. The upside to this is I take the weekends off a bit. I still eat a small breakfast and small lunch, but I'm much less critical of what I eat in the evening. I eat what I want, but never finish my plate. This becomes much easier to do once your stomach shrinks. Then when Monday comes around, it's back to normal.

I know some of you are thinking this diet is crazy (I'm being very presumptuous here, I know we don't have that many readers). But my coworker and his partner have been doing a variation of this diet since Jan 1 and they have lost almost 40 pounds each (they also incorporate Lean Pockets with his LC's). Plus, for those of you who work as much as K and I do, you seldom have time to cook a large meal. Popping the LC in the microwave makes "cooking" dinner a snap.

I'll be charting my progress over the course of the summer. Right now I've lost 4.5 pounds since last Monday. If you want to join the challenge, post your progress as a comment to my LC Challenge posts, so we can all keep each other motivated!

Word of caution - you will be hungry the first week. But it subsides. No really, it does!