A Lifestyle Change by Any Name is Still Expensive, or Day 4 on a Diet

Day 4, it turns out, is a great big giant improvement over Day 3. Though I’ve been hungry at times, I haven’t felt starved at any point. I haven’t felt shaky and panicked. I haven’t had any long, unpleasant daydreams about Snickers bars.

I’m not sure if that’s because I’m starting to adjust to fewer calories, or if it is because I went about things differently. I did not, you see, start the day with a Slimfast. I made an omelette instead…with Egg Beaters, of course. By my calculations, which could be wildly inaccurate for all I know, my omelette had about 260 calories. That’s 80 calories more than a Slimfast, but I didn’t feel hungry again all morning, which means I didn’t have a mid-morning snack, which means that in the end I consumed fewer calories in the am hours today than I did yesterday.

I did have a Slimfast for lunch. I was in my office by then, and honestly, there’s no place worse than Ellisville, MS to be on a diet, particularly if you are a vegetarian. Ask me sometime about the faculty dinner last year at which I ate a pack of snack crackers from my friend’s purse because there was not a single vegetarian item on the menu, not even the salad. I quake at the idea of returning for another faculty orientation for that reason alone. On a good day, the most vegetarian items to be found are cheese pizza and yogurt parfaits. Unless, of course, you don’t really care if your lettuce leaves are a little wilty and you have to pick a little ham off of them. On a bad day…well, there are some bad days. That’s all I’m going to say.

At any rate, it isn’t possible to diet at work without taking your own lunch. I took Slimfast because I didn’t have time to think up anything else.

An hour later I was hungry. I ate some almonds and muddled through.

I still had a better day. I still had a hungry but not starved day. Maybe it is all about the egg beaters.

Last night I read the South Beach Diet book on the recommendation of The Ben Reynolds (who works at The Johns Hopkins). There’s quite a bit in it about the importance of keeping your blood sugar levels level, hence my switch to the slow-to-digest omelette as opposed the liquid carbohydrates Slimfast.

I think there’s something to this. I feel much better.

I also went to the grocery store again today (third time this week). I bought three different kinds of salad dressing, two different kinds of salsa, and about ten cans of vegetarian chili. All of this is to answer my question of, “How can a vegetarian do the South Beach diet?”

With a whole lot of forethought, it seems, and with no small amount of cash. The different varieties of salad dressing, for example, seem immensely necessary to me as a means of keeping me from feeling too disgusted by the idea of eating yet another salad sans the full fat ranch of my choice.

The broccoli and mushrooms I bought today also seem necessary because they are broccoli and mushrooms, and they will taste good together.

None it is cheap, and none of it is immediately obvious to me. I have to walk around in the store and think about it. This leads to impulse shopping. Ask me about the toasted wasabi beans I came home with today. Impulse shopping is never cheap.

Still, I know no other way to start a “lifestyle change.”

This realization leads me to ponder once again how it’s no wonder that poor states like Mississippi have the highest obesity rates.

So my diet will last until I run out of money or until I figure out a way to make this less expensive, whichever comes first. It could go either way. Really. It could go either way.