justdrew

Shopping for the new diet plan

Okay, so on my journey to cutting out my excess bodyfat and getting into better shape, I need to take my okay-diet and move it into a really-great-diet.

This plan has full meals set up so I don’t have to count calories, just measure more than I normally do (which is to say at all).

For those of you who have ever seen the British nutritionist Gillian McKeith (her show “You are what you eat” can be seen here in the States via BBC America) you will be familiar with her tactic of confronting people about their personal dietary choices.

It takes the form of an intervention-like confrontation where she wheels in a table chock full of the junk her client consumes in a typical week. There must be something powerful about being confronted by all the grotesque, sugar and fat-laden foods that some of us take in. I say this because it is usually at this point the subject bursts into tears. I don’t think most are just maudlin for the camera either. For the most part, they seem shocked.

Sometimes it’s the volume of crap on that table, other times it’s the disgusting junk- most of which I wouldn’t have eaten even before I woke up to the fact that I needed to pay more attention to my food choices.

Well, such a confrontation wouldn’t have had a big impact on me. I know why I’ve lost definition to my physique. The food I eat is quite healthy- it’s just that I don’t eat enough variety and don’t eat regularly enough to keep my metabolism burning excess fats. But most of all, it’s the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of time at the computer and not nearly enough time being active.

So- the wind-up to all this is that once Ms McKeith confronts her subject with the bad food table, she rolls in a similar spread to represent what the new week’s line-up will look like.

Invariably, it’s a burst of color (mostly green) and (this is television, after all) it all looks wonderfully desirable. I use the word desirable here because you know many of those items are gonna have some bitter tastes and may not actually be the first thing any of us would reach out and grab when we were really hungry. However, no doubt that just looking at it- you know you’d feel better after having eaten at that table for a week.

Jeanette’s in London for a couple weeks, so as I kick off my plan, I’m bacheloring it. A run to the store to get my week’s worth of new food took a while. Not because I’m one of those guys who’s clueless at the grocery store, but because everything on the list was so particular. I also wanted to be sure that I give this program a real shot. To me, that means sticking as close to the plan as I can.

Coming home with my bounty, the image of that week’s table just wouldn’t leave my head, so I snapped a shot. “Desirable”, no?

Drew's food for the first week of his new program

I figure I’ll tweak and modify anything that just doesn’t fit in my lifestyle- but not without giving it an honest shot first.

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