that I've given up

On the oatmeal that is. I would rather eat one of the foods I have twice in one day than have to eat that rank cat vomit again. I just really can't get past the smell. It was so warm that it smelled up my whole office and when I walked to the bathroom I could still smell it seeping from the kitchen.....3 hours later.

So because I've given up on the oatmeal I have 5 packets of it left over. When I was signing up for Medifast there was another woman in the office telling me if I didn't like something to just hold onto it and there is a basket in the back where people drop stuff they don't like and switch it out with something someone else left behind.

So today I am eating 2 peanut butter bars. Tomorrow I'll have 2 puddings, and Friday I'll have 2 chilies or 2 brownies. Friday is my next appointment so I'll be getting new food and weighing in.

You may be wondering how the plan works and thinking "it must be boring eating the same 5 things for a week!" Well that is really only the case for this week. When I signed up I got 7 days of free food. That is 5 boxes of Medifast food and each box has 7 packets in it. When I was in the office me and the woman (I don't know what to call her? Employee? Manager? Well she is the manager...) I'll call her clinician... we went through and picked out some meals. When I go back on Friday we may pick out 2 weeks of options. I don't want to pick out a month of food because I don't want to be stuck with things I don't like, so I'll go slow, trying a few new things at a time until I've tried all of it (excluding the other oatmeal flavors) and know what I want to keep getting.

You also may be wondering how long I will be doing this. I will be in the Medifast program for 81 weeks! So if you know there are 52 weeks in a year.. well yea... I'll be doing this for a long time.

I should be at my goal weight by Christmas, which will be 50 lbs lighter! I just hope my head doesn't look huge on a new smaller body. And yes, there will be a few road-blocks along the way... like my trip for work in September (luckily only one night away), my trip to Las Vegas for a girls week in October, a conference for work in November in New Orleans (and I've never been so I'm going to have to EAT some of the great things there), and of course the holidays. Surprisingly out of all of those things I'll have to deal with in the coming months, I am least worried about the holidays and Vegas. The holidays I'll be at home, I can sample a few things at thanksgiving, but I'm not that big on all the thanksgiving food anyways. And Vegas... we'll be in a time share which is pretty much a full condo w/ a kitchen, so I'll be able to bring a week of food, do some grocery shopping and then we'll probably eat out a couple of nights. I think I'll be okay.

Once I hit my goal (hopefully still around Christmas), I will go into stabilization which means I won't be trying to lose anymore weight. My calorie intake will slowly go up and I will start weening off the Medifast meals...slowly adding more veggies and fruit mostly. The stabilization will be about 8-12 weeks. It goes by how much weight you lost and I forget what she said for me.

After stabalization I'll be doing Maintenance!!! I love to clean.
No, not that kind of maintenance, but you knew that.
I won't be eating ANY Medifast foods. I will hopefully have trained myself to eat throughout the day, what I can and can not have, and worked myself into a regular exercise routine.

I'm excited.

Off to eat breakfast #2. Bye for now.

that I had a lot to say

continued from the post below....

Besides what was happening in the present I then moved on to recapping my meals yesterday. From here on I’ll go about as I was. Probably less humorous since I’m in a bad mood now.

So after lunch I had some chocolate pudding. I was pretty optimisitic about eating it since my chili experience had been about 20 steps up from the oatmeal. I forgot my little whisk bottle and measuring cup so it was kinda chunky and I’m not sure I added enough water, but it was still decent. I'll try to perfect it today.

After work I went to visit my mom since it was her birthday. Got her a little tart, card, and flowers from whole foods and picked up some broccoli, soy sauce, chicken, and chicken broth for my dinner. When I got to her house she wanted to go look at these some glasses. She just found out she has to start wearing glasses regularly and has been to about 5 places looking for the right pair. Well, 2 hours into this excursion (in one store that she had been to earlier that day) she finally picked a pair that were probably worth more than my life. But I must admit, they did look a lot better than all the others she tried on. It’s a half rim brownish metal with a plastic stem with a really neat design. Apparently every pair is hand-made and none are the same... hence the price!

By the time we were done picking through millions of pairs I dropped my mom off and headed home. I stopped at 7-11 by my house to see if they had safety pins and as I was leaving some guy stopped me and chatted me up. While I stood there talking to him for 15-20 minutes I tried not to look like a starving child about to rip his head off for being the only thing between me and my dinner (now 3 hours after I was supposed to eat it). He was nice enough so I stuck it out, we exchanged numbers and I sped the 500 yards home to make my dinner.

In the plan I am supposed to eat 5 of the Medifast meals a day and one Lean & Green meal that I make. The program came with a cook book with some pretty good ideas in it. I picked one that was easy and that I had most of the ingredients for. Some of them had a prep time of an hour and for me, no meal is worth waiting that long and I knew I wouldn’t have the patience for it (even if I had gotten home on time). I made Chicken Broccoli Dijon. I just had to cut up some skinless chicken breast into strips and marinate it in soy sauce for 30 minutes. It probably wasn’t 30 minutes but I put it in a bowl to marinate while I cut up broccoli and garlic and sautéed them with a little olive oil in a pan. Put the broccoli in a bowl then cooked the chicken through, added some chicken broth and the mustard (the recipe called for Dijon and I had spicy brown mustard- not really sure if they’re the same but they look the same to me so I wasn’t about to buy some Dijon mustard when I know I probably won’t eat it). Once that was all done I put the broccoli back in the pan, cooked it all a bit more and then it was finally time to NOM! And it was de-li-cious! (I made twice the serving size of the recipe so I wouldn’t have to cook again tomorrow)

After dinner I had a Medifast brownie. They come with these cute little trays to heat it up in and if you’ve ever had those individual brownie bowls it’s kinda like that. Just mix with water and heat it up. It was nice to get to have dessert with dinner, but this won’t normally be the case- I’ll normally have something about 2 hours after I make dinner, but they say if you miss a meal to still eat all of them (even if it means eating 2 together)...so I did. It looked promising but something was off when I started eating it. It had little chocolate chips in it which I could taste and it was generally good but I just couldn’t put my finger on it. I made one of my roommates try it and she said it was the consistency. Ah-ha! Is was almost too moist... like a sponge and made me gag a little... so like the oatmeal yesterday and today, I ate it as fast as I could and washed it down with lots of water. I think when I made it tonight I’ll try mixing it up a little more or heating it up a little longer. It has potential... unlike the oatmeal. I'll post a picture of that tomorrow.

Well, that's all for now.