It’s a sad day when you look at recent photos of yourself and don’t really recognize yourself.  It’s a tough day when you realize you really need to lose 50 pounds.  It’s a stressful day when you know you don’t really have the time or energy to plan a course of action.  So, this book came on my radar at just the right time.  Here was a plan that would hopefully give me some fast results and some good ideas on changing my menu and I might even learn to cook vegetables yummy enough for my two guys to eat them!

The idea is that you will lose 5 pounds for 5 days, maintain for 2 days, and lose 5 more the next 5 days, maintain for 2, and then again for a total of 28 days, and ideally you’ve lost 20 pounds.  I decided to give it a shot and started last Monday.  The diet is really just cutting calories. Here’s a pic of my daily meal plan from the book.

You can see for those first 5 days I was supposed to be around 850-900 calories a day and I was able to stick to that.  I didn’t cheat and by Saturday morning had lost 5.5 pounds.  Not bad!  Now on the weekend I was allowed more food and as a treat I let myself have wine both nights and still managed to lose another half a pound. SO, I managed to lose 6 pounds this first week.

I’ll update every week and we’ll see how it works out.

The plusses

I lost weight

The food (except for one loser) has been really good.

Meals are quick to prepare and cook.

He provides ready-made substitutions for every meal.

The minuses

It is expensive to buy food for all the recipes he provides.

It’s hard to find many of the ingredients.

The specific shopping took way too much time this week because I wasn’t familiar with many of the ingredients.

His recipes are for 4 servings!  Seriously, this makes no sense in a diet book.

At the end of the third day I went to bed with a headache and woke up with one the next morning so I skipped the protein shake and went straight for the real food and it helped.  I have followed the menu fairly faithfully but have switched the order of the foods as the mood strikes.  I was supposed to have grapefruit every morning but after the first day I just couldn’t make myself do it so I switched to half an orange.

I took a photo of my two favorite recipes this week if you want to give them a try!

 As you can see I added the shrimp and the extra calories.

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I didn’t have nor could I find red curry past so I used garlic paste.   And I used real cooked turkey, not from the deli.

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If you have any questions, I’d be happy to answer!