tweaking my plan

over the last two weeks, my plan has been evolving dramatically. in retrospect, at first i was probably not cutting nearly as many calories as i thought. the main culprit? SALAD.

friggin salad. so deceptive. an enourmous costco thing of mesculin has just 100 calories and i can't possibly eat the whole thing in a sitting. but it's so dry! So i add some dressing. but because the darn thing is so big, i need to add half-a-bottle of dressing to sufficiently cover the leaves. then i add tomatoes (low in calories) cucumbers (even lower in calories), and nuts. not so low in calories.

today i was reading labels and found that a bottle of dressing no larger than of can of coke has a whopping 2200 calories!!!
and i was probably putting in just as many calories in the form of nuts. avocado? 350 calories.

only i could come up with a 4000-calorie salad.
(actually, that's not true.. but wow.)

so..

salad without high-calorie dressing.
and without nuts.

my list of "authorized" foods thus consists solely of:
vegetables
fruit
squash
corn
fish
salsa and tomato sauce
water, seltzer, coffee, tea, and maybe diet soda

specifically prohibited foods include:
anything derived from wheat.
salad dressing (damn!)
alcohol
nuts
red meat & pork
any drink containing more than 5 calories
dairy, especially butter

this is good, it has taken me two weeks to refine this list into what it is today. Starting tomorrow (monday), i will have an official weigh-in and i'll follow this thing to the letter, and keep it up for four months. I am going to allow myself maybe 4 "binge days" in the period, for various reasons. like i've posted here before, i'm going to celebrate when i first drop below 300 lbs. also, during my trip to california, i have to eat some burritos. the period that i'm in california, which is 3½ weeks long, will be the hardest for me. so i don't know how i'm going to set that up yet..

anyway, i'm really shooting for about 1000 calories a day, because i'm harboring unrealistic dreams of losing 30 lbs a month. i figure that if i come in less than 1500, i had a good day.. but 2000 is my absolute limit. yesterday was closer to 2000 than 1000. today i'm shooting to come in below 1000. the number of sub-1000 calorie days i can pull off every week is the key to my success.


tomorrow - the official weigh-in.

-steve