Thirty pounds down. Nineteen weeks in. About a pound and a half a week, which is exactly the pace a sustainable diet should run at. This is a marathon, not a sprint — and week 19 is proof that you can run that marathon eating food you actually want to eat.
This week’s menu: steak, broccoli beef, salmon, fried chicken tenders (with a salad to compensate), 红烧排骨 (hong shao pai gu — red-braised pork ribs, yes with sugar), chicken tandoori with chicken thighs, and tonight’s dish, Thai basil chicken. None of those sound like diet food. That’s the point. If you’re picturing protein shakes and plain chicken breast and tofu, that’s not what’s happening here. I’m eating food I love. I’m just eating less of it.
A few things clicked this week that are worth sharing. First: I’m not as hungry as I used to be. At the start of this I was talking about hunger constantly. Now I don’t think about it as much. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m actually less hungry, or because I’ve gotten used to what it feels like to be a little bit hungry and I’ve stopped fighting it. Either way, the result is the same — it’s manageable now in a way it wasn’t in the early weeks.
Second: I turned down pizza in the staff room and passed on birthday cake for a colleague. Not because I have iron willpower — it’s that I had my own leftovers with me and I knew exactly what was in them. Having the plan in place makes the refusal automatic. You’re not making a decision in the moment, you’re just following what’s already decided. I still feel a little bad refusing food from people, but they are starting to catch on and respect my meal plan.
Third — and this one’s worth writing down: you don’t need a scale to portion correctly. Three pounds of chicken, divided by eight portions, is six ounces each. Half a cup scoop for rice, one half for me, one half saved for tomorrow’s lunch. No scale needed. Once you understand the math behind your portions, you internalize it and it becomes automatic. Claude taught me that.
The 25-calorie popsicle over the 220-calorie Häagen-Dazs bar is also part of this week’s story. I grew up on whole milk. Then we switched to 2%, then skim, and eventually whole milk tasted too rich to go back to. That’s what’s happening with food now — I chose the popsicle, it satisfied the craving, and I didn’t miss the ice cream bar. The habits are changing under the surface. That’s how this sticks long term.
