I Love (the) Food (Network)

I think we may be the only couple in America to eat at two places featured on the Food Network in one week separated by a thousand miles. Diners, Dives and Drive Inns featured Joe's Farm Grill in Gilbert AZ and The Shed in Ocean Springs Ms on one show. And we enjoyed them both.





So we had delicious BBQ and wonderful fried Catfish at Aunt Jenny's in Ocean Springs MS, and a huge seafood meal with a jumbo baked potato at McGuire's Irish Pub in Pensacola FL. Is it a surprise that I gained 3 lbs in a week. This allows me to mention in my first week of blogging my lifelong struggle with food, because I love food.

I weighed 180 lbs as a senior in High School, I was a 6 ft athletic type, the weight gain began in college and started with the invention of that cursed food of all single men. Yes, I'm talking Hamburger Helper. My roommates and I ate that stuff several times week in graduate school. So I spent a couple of years around 215, a decade or so at 230, and for the last decade or so between 240 and 250. Now that's a lot of weight to be carrying around, especially since it created the LUMP. You know, the Lump around the belly.

So, the one group of people I want to bop in the nose are those who glibly say, all you have to do is eat less calories than you consume and you will lose weight. Now that may be technically true, but in the real world there are a million opportunities to overeat just a little and very few days when you eat less than you need. I am not whistling Dixie on this fact, friends.

Around the beginning of 2008 I made a renewed effort to lose weight, motivated by the High School Reunion coming in July. I had gotten to a super Lumpy 250 a time or two, so with weekly exercise, and cutting down portion sizes, I managed to get off 12-15 lbs the first half of the year.

Now that the Shed BBQ became part of the Lump, I was faced with "Shedding" more weight.
Long story short, our friend Jill said she lost 15 lbs on the South Beach Diet....and although I already owned two books on the Glycemic index on my expansive bookshelf of diet books that worked for a while, I decided to give it a try. Today is day 6 and I am pleased to report that the book has done what it promised so far with its very simple set of rules. I have lost about a pound a day and have not been hungry. Hallelujah.....I'm "Shedding" weight.

Before and After pictures to follow at the end of my 14 day strict part of the diet.