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

baby food diet. He said that while there is nothing
particularly unhealthy about baby food, it doesn’t contain anywhere near enough
calories for adults. He also mentioned that constipation, irritability and loss
of concentration would again be an issue. Why is it that every diet only seems
to have negative side effects? I’m longing for the day when Louis says to me,
"Now Andy, on this diet you are never going to be hungry, you’ll be alert,
your mood will improve and you will almost certainly beat Joel at golf this
weekend."
     
    I struggled through days two and three
of the baby food diet by skipping breakfast, drinking black coffee and then
slipping off to a quiet corner at work to endure the various delights that
Heinz, Ella’s Kitchen and Cow & Gate had to offer. I would then struggle on
for the rest of the day, hungry, tired, irritable and downright miserable,
until it was time to go home, where I would then prepare a healthy meal. My
healthy meals consisted mainly of chicken and vegetables, with a small amount
of potato in the vain attempt to lift my mood. It was incredibly hard to keep
going, and the lack of calories was tough, but it was the general blandness of
the baby food itself that made it so difficult for me. Even though I was
starving, I found myself dreading lunch. I ended up adding so much salt to the
baby food that I genuinely thought I could be doing myself some damage, so by
day three I had started adding Tabasco sauce instead.
     
    Days four and five were the hardest of
all as it was the weekend. They say that men think about sex every seven
seconds, and whether that’s true or not, I can confirm that the study was
definitely not conducted while those men were on the baby food diet. There was
no way I could be thinking about sex every seven seconds whilst I was consumed
with thinking about food every three seconds. With no work to distract me, food
was all I could think about. I tried to steer clear of the kitchen, but even
then I’d be confronted by the children’s play kitchen in the dining room. I
would try everything I could to take my mind off food, and suddenly every
answer on the crossword was a food item, my daughters suddenly wanted to play
‘shops’, and every programme on the TV was a cooking programme. It got so bad
that I ended up voluntarily suggesting we went shopping. Actual shopping that
involves walking around the shops, looking at things and buying things.
Usually, in order to convince me to come shopping, my wife has to use a clever
system whereby she deploys on me the perfect mix of guilt and bargaining.
     
    The idea of the shopping trip was to
take me away from the temptations of food and to distract my mind, but it was a
disaster right from the very start. From the moment we walked into the shopping
centre we were surrounded by people giving us cards and leaflets offering us
money off various items of food and drink. A little further on we were met by a
huge Christmas food market, complete with pretty girls in gingham dresses
offering free tasters. I ducked into a book shop to escape the temptation and
was immediately met by the faces of Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay, each
peddling their latest Christmas offerings.
     
    I managed to get through the day without
giving in to the food, but I did end up spending far more money than I had
anticipated in the desperate hope of staying one step ahead of temptation. I
was excited when it came to stepping on the scales because I knew that I had
worked so hard. For the first time in quite a few diets, I hadn’t cheated at
all (except for skipping breakfast, which I saw more of a modification than a
blatant rule break) and I was therefore disappointed to discover that I’d only
lost one pound. In diet terms, weight loss of one pound a week is perfectly
acceptable and is in fact deemed the healthiest way to lose weight. The idea is
that you make slow and steady process, but on a 50-day challenge there is no
room for slow and