I will not bore the rest of you with the progress report on how my diet is doing.

Well, I weighed in last evening at the Y, finally and I've lost another couple of pounds. That makes about 8 since I started actually keeping track. For some reason, the debuts of diets tend to fuzz over as I get going. I can never quite remember what I started with, possibly because
it was so high I couldn't face it. Anyway, per my new "diet solution I'm only losing five pounds at a time, and I still have one pound more to go before I reach that goal. That's counting from the "official" start of the diet two weeks ago last Saturday.

I think it's true that South Beach and Atkins give you a nice boost to start off because you do lose a tidy bundle if you stick with them. Of course, what I'm trying to do is KEEP it off. I dreamed last night that I did something that I am definitely wont to do: I started by licking
the spoon on the cake batter and ended up eating spoon after spoon of raw batter. I love that stuff. But it was a dream, not a reality.

I have been something of a slacker though. Not with the diet itself. Raf is doing it with me, and helping cook the meals, and boy if there ever was a stickler for doing it exactly right, it's him. One of the advantages of having an Aspie son. No, I not made the reminder cards I am supposed to make, nor am I writing down in advance each day what I'm going to eat tomorrow. The first week, Raf and I sort of improvised on the THEME of the South Beach diet, mixing and matching the menu items as our fridge stock allowed. This week, though, we are trying to stick more exactly since there are some excellent recipes on here. But I'm not writing it down and then crossing off what I've substituted. The idea is to plan exactly what you're going to eat, and to PLAN treats or deviations from the diet plan rather than allowing ANY impromptu eating to take place. I get that and I agree with it; I just haven't found/taken/made the time to
do it. I need to make up a graph, too. The one Beck proposes has a five pound spread in half-pound increments. One of my writing gurus calls this the one-inch picture frame. Somebody else calls it baby steps. It is so true that if I can celebrate even a half-pound when the going get tougher in a month or two, I'm going to feel better about all this deprivation.

Actually, it doesn't feel much like deprivation. Oh, those soft double chocolate cookies with white chocolate chunks and macadamia nuts they served at the hiking club were tempting. But I could see that I could anticipate something like that and put it in the plan. One cookie. Not
five, which is my usual response to that sort of cookie. There's an Alliance Francaise picnic coming up this weekend and I'm thinking of allowing myself a quarter of a cup of cous-cous salad. Cous-cous is not on the first phase diet, though it is on the second phase.

Now that JF is gone, I've also finished my last pack of cigarettes it's now 24-hours since my last cigarette. I know I can use the principles I've learned dieting on cigarette-quitting, and I also know my own weakness here MUCH more intimately than my weakness for food. Actually, I think they are one and the same problem: the "giving-in muscle" is just very strong, and the resistence muscle is weak. I know that in the presence of smokers, I invariably bum a cig and that starts me on the spiral. So I've got to work on being around smokers and NOT having even one. Well, for now, I don't know any smokers to be around, so I'm safe until I get over the initial three days or so, the physical part. Since I've quit so often, it turns out that THAT part is not all that difficult for me.

But I do know that I've used cigarettes to blunt the hunger I've felt between meals on this diet, so I anticipate that the going will be a bit tough for a few days as I deal with hunger as well as nicotine withdrawal. I get sort of panicky when I'm hungry-- I came up against that when I skipped lunch on the day I was supposed to in the Beck Diet Solution. Wild ideas of stopping at a convenience store for "something, anything" came bounding into my head. At that point, I had a cigarette and calmed myself and my hunger pangs down. But now I won't have my crutch.

Luckily, I'm busier'n a one-armed paper-hanger. My eight hours a day at work sure takes a bite out of the administrative job of running a household, especially with one of the members of the household gone and going to be gone until practically the end of June. JF is off to Mexico
on Sunday. For now, he's in Austin, Texas, hanging out with our good friends there. In some ways, I have LESS to do with him gone, since I'm constantly trying to prove that a 40-hour-a-week job WON'T take away ALL the time I have to spend with him (something he accuses me of on a regular basis) and also get the laundry done and the checks written and the boy organized and the tomatoes watered, etc.

I need to write those cards and start writing down my meal plans...I want to stick to this plan, I'm just finding it hard to find the time. Rejoice with me the EIGHT !!!!! pounds I've already lost. Pat, pat, pat...I'm giving myself credit.