Minimize Me: 10 Diets to Lose 25 Lbs in 50 Days by Andy Leeks

and is perhaps not best-suited to a
corner-cutter like me.
     
    Starting Weight: 14 stone 7.5 lbs
     
    Finishing Weight: 14 stone 4.5 lbs
     
    Weight loss: 3 lbs (Mostly through
illness)
     
    % of body weight lost: 1.0 %
     
    Faffiness: 7/10
     
    Difficulty: 7/10
     
    Would I do it again? No
     
    Total weight lost: 23.5
lbs

Diet 7 - The Baby Food Diet
     
     
    Wednesday 19th November to Sunday 23rd
November
     
    Weight: 14 Stone 4.5 lbs
     
    When I first decided to include the baby
food diet in my list of ten, I was guilty of making assumptions. With so much
to organise and plan, I did find myself skim reading the small print on some of
the diets, and in doing so I had wrongly assumed that the baby food diet
consisted solely of blending up a little home-cooked food. I had imagined
myself cooking a batch of food that was low in salt, spice and, let’s be
honest, flavour, before simply blending it or mashing it to a pulp. Not so.
     
    The baby food diet is shrouded in
mystery, and after undertaking an afternoon of internet research (which, if I’m
being entirely truthful, did mainly consist of watching Friends re-runs and
copious videos of cute animals on YouTube) I found that there were no set
guidelines at all. The diet has never been officially published and the
apparent creator, Tracy Anderson, has distanced herself from it.
     
    The very few snippets of information I
did manage to gleam from the internet informed me that I should replace two of
my three main meals per day with baby food. It was very specific in that the
baby food should be the kind that comes in pouches or jars and not the kind
that you can simply muster up at home. Worryingly, some versions of the diet
call for eating up to fourteen servings per day and, as much as I’m willing to
embrace each diet, that for me is taking it too far. Talking of taking it too
far, I must take this opportunity to thank my wife for presenting me with a
three-pack of baby spoons and bibs, each with my name on, this morning. I
suppose she thought she was being funny. Well, we’ll see how funny she thinks
it is when I wake her up in the middle of the night crying my eyes out after
wetting the bed!
     
    While shopping for baby food, I did have
a sense of deja vu, as the combinations of vegetables and fruits seemed
worryingly similar to the juice diet. There were broccoli, peas and pears,
there were carrots, apples and parsnips and even spinach, apples and swede. I
could feel my heart rate quicken as I looked at the food on offer, and the
memories of the juice diet kept on flooding back. I consoled myself with the
thought that at least with the baby food diet, I could have one normal,
adult-sized meal per day, and that would be enough to get me through.
     
    When heating baby food it’s accepted
practice that one should check the temperature of the food by dabbing a small
amount against the lips, but during a lunch out with the family the previous
week I ended up taking it one stage further and had two full mouthfuls,
wondering what it was like in preparation for this week. The looks I received
were priceless. I didn’t make things any easier on myself by not actually
ordering any lunch for myself in the first place and by proudly declaring that
it "wasn’t bad" and that it "just needed a little more
salt".
     
    I have to say that my initial opinion of
baby food was definitely affected by not having eaten for a couple of days and
the fact that I was recovering from a particularly nasty bout of illness. I’d
have probably said the same about anything in truth. But I can boldly declare
right here and now that baby food is in fact disgusting. There obviously isn’t
anything wrong with baby food, and they certainly wouldn’t be giving it to
babies if there were, it’s just that it’s so bland. For all the triumphant
hyperbole about ‘organic’ this and ‘free from’ that, it ends up tasting exactly
like what it looks like – green or orange mush. The ‘free from’