Step 5 - Fried Foods

If something tastes good, it'll taste better fried.

That about sums up my thoughts on fried food. Anything dredged in batter then dunked in hot oil = good times in my mouth. Fried Chicken. Chicken Fried Steak. Fried Catfish. Fried Okra. Fried Pickles. Onion Rings. And for dessert? Fried Twinkies, Fried Oreo's and Fried Cheesecake at the State Fair! Last, but certainly not least, the ultimate in fried food dining - the Hushpuppy: nothing but the batter, rolled up in a ball and fried to perfection.

This list of the five absolute worst foods you can eat, includes fried doughnuts, french fries, chips, and fried seafood. Funny, the only thing not fried? Soda.

As if the artery-clogging amount of trans fat in fried foods weren't bad enough, the high cooking heat can lead to the formation of carcinogens. Add the potential unhealthiness of the item being fried - like chicken skin, for instance - and you've got a triple dose of death on your plate.

So this is another one of those no-brainers: the less fried food I eat, the better. But while the other things I've cut have been relatively easy to do (minus my Coke withdrawals), this one is proving a little tougher. Skipping a trip to Popeye's or the all you can eat Catfish buffet hasn't been a problem. Avoiding fried "sides" has.

As I progress on the Rehab Diet I've started making healthier choices in my main course - Subway instead of a burger joint, grilled chicken instead of fried - but I've paid less attention to the side items. Now that fried foods are off the menu, I'm noticing how much of those fried sides I regularly consumed.

Worst of all: the tortilla chip.

As a resident of Texas, I'm required to eat Mexican food at least three times a week. Luckily, there are a handful of healthier options at most Mexican restaurants, including a dish like Chicken Tacos Al Carbon. Assuming they don't use too much lard in their tortilla's, it's a healthy enough meal of grilled chicken, pico de gallo and guacamole. The wild card is those damn chips. My family of four can go through 3-4 baskets at a sitting, usually accompanied by some form of cheese dip.

It has been the hardest temptation to resist since starting the Rehab Diet. On a positive note, this blog has resulted in a real world "intervention" of sorts. At dinner the other night with friends, a basket of tortilla chips was placed on the table. I was rationalizing having "just a few" in my mind when a friend (and reader of this blog) shook his head and said, "too bad you can't have any of these chips."

I wish for his slow and painful death...

Goals

Skinny people will tell you that you have to set a goal before starting a diet. You have to know where you're going in order to get there, they say.

A lot of people have asked me what my goal is on the Rehab Diet. Interestingly, I never really thought of one. I'm a big fan of making lists and writing down goals and keeping track of progress. I do it in my business and other areas of my personal life, and to be honest, I've done it in the past at the start of diets. But setting up weight loss goals does two things to the fat person:

1) It sets up the potential for failure, and 2) It creates the notion that once the goal weight is met, the job is finished.

I'll explain:

The fat mind is a fragile mechanism that needs to be cajoled, manipulated and even lied to at times, in order to keep the train on the tracks. Determining a weight loss goal at the beginning of this process - say 10% of my body weight - would have made me get out the calculator and determine what I needed to lose each week. In order for me to lose 30 pounds in twelve weeks I would need to lose, on average, 2.5 pounds a week. Certainly doable and not too far from the range skinny people claim is "healthy."

If you've followed my weigh-ins, you know I lost 2 pounds a week in my first three weeks. Given my propensity to lose large amounts of weight very quickly (albeit by starving myself), I can't tell you how discouraged I'd be if I felt like those measly two pounds a week fell short of some pre-determined goal - even if it were just by half a pound.

On the contrary, I lost 2 pounds that first week by doing nothing but cutting Coke out of my diet. Frankly, I wasn't expecting to lose a thing - I figured I was just making a healthier choice that would pay dividends further down the road. Imagine how giddy I was to see actual weight loss and how motivated that made me to continue?

A simple goal of weighing less than I did the week before I weighed in is about all I'm willing to commit to. Over the course of twelve weeks, I figure at the very least, I'll be 12 pounds lighter and better off than I was when I started.

The second issue with creating a goal weight is this notion that once you reach it, you're done. Nothing could be further from the truth. The number should not be the goal - the bad habits that are broken and the healthy habits that are developed are what I'm hoping will sustain my prolonged weight control (damn, I'm starting to sound like one of them). Slowly but steadily, over the course of twelve weeks, I'm changing the way I live, and that's the ultimate goal.

Weigh In - 3/5

I'm very happy to report I've doubled up on my weight loss this week, losing four pounds and bringing my total weight loss to ten pounds! In celebration of the occasion, I thought I'd list a few things that weigh ten pounds to help illustrate what I'm no longer carrying around:


1) 19" Flat Panel Television
2) Five Reams of Copier Paper
3) Bag of Indian Basmati Rice
4) Dell XPS Laptop Computer
5) Lump of Beeswax

On to step 5...

Food Porn

I've noticed something odd in the last couple of weeks - I've developed a voracious appetite for food related television. I'll watch anything on the Food Network (except for Alton Brown - I don't care why fried chicken gets crispy in oil, I just care that it tastes like a party in my mouth). I watch Hells Kitchen and Kitchen Nightmares with Gordon Ramsey (the Fox version doesn't compare to the original on BBC). I watch No Reservations with Anthony Bourdain and my Tivo is chocked full of all three seasons of Top Chef. I can't get enough.

At first I thought it was just a natural reaction to my healthier lifestyle. When stuffed to the gills, the last thing I want to do is watch someone cooking and eating more food. Now that I'm "less stuffed," I don't mind Rachel Ray's chipper abbreviations or Andrew Zimmerman's cockroach cocktails. But I think it goes a little deeper than that.

I think I'm addicted to food porn.

The fresh and often times, exotic ingredients. The sizzle of a pan you can almost smell! The colorful, vibrant dishes, plated just so. They make it look so inviting and so deliciously tasty and so.... I should probably stop now.

So the big question is this: is my addiction to food porn detrimental to my weight loss goals? Or can it, in some strange way, actually benefit me on my quest for a healthier lifestyle?

The way I see it is this: a skinny person will tell you the key to losing weight is never to let yourself get hungry. Had this skinny person ever actually been more than 10 pounds overweight, he or she would understand - fat people are hungry ALL THE TIME! If you're used to consuming 4,000 calories and 200 grams of fat a day, no amount of "small, manageable meals throughout the day" are going to keep you from being hungry (unless said meals add up to 4,000 calories and 200 grams of fat).

No, the key to a FAT person losing weight is learning how to embrace hunger. Getting to know the sensation for the first time in a long time and coming to some level of peace with it. Facing the beast head on and learning how to manage it.

Oddly enough, food porn helps me do that. Yes, I get pangs in my stomach after watching some of these shows. But its different than a hunger for Cheetos or Kit Kats. While many of these shows don't highlight particularly healthy options (damn you Paula Deen and your Krispy Kreme bread pudding), almost all are using fresh ingredients and cooking REAL food. Not the overly-processed and boxed crap I've been stuffing my face with for twenty years.

So yes, food porn makes me hungry. But its a hunger for real food using fresh ingredients that's actually "cooked" - not zapped in the microwave or picked up in the drive-thru. Hopefully that translates into eating better instead of eating more.

I've got to go now - Iron Chef is starting...

Step 4 - Water

Skinny people say you're supposed to drink upwards of 60 oz of water a day, or roughly half a gallon. And for one of the very few times, I agree wholeheartedly with skinny people! Its amazing how that much water cleanses your system, suppresses your appetite and fuels your workouts.

If and when I drank water before, it was bottled. Cute, little convenient 10 oz servings I kept cold in the fridge that were ready to go at a moments notice. And as I started step 4, I made sure I had a bottle in each hand every time I left the house. It didn't take long for me to recognize how many bottles I was blowing through as I tried to reach the expert-recommended level of 60 oz a day.

Now I'm no environmentalist. I'm all for the rain forests and spotted owls prospering, so long as neither one interferes with my God-given right to air conditioning. But the site of my trash can filled with nothing but empty plastic bottles really seemed ridiculous.

Finally, I hit the bottom of the well. With no Sam's run in my immediate future and my supply of bottled water depleted I did the unthinkable. I got out a plastic cup, filled it with ice, walked to the tap and filled it up. It tasted a little different at first, but (just like my taste buds adjusting to less grease and sugar and fat) after a couple of days, my mouth is none the wiser.

Despite my wife's insistence that she can taste the difference between water from the kitchen and water from the bathroom, I'm convinced 99% of humans can't tell a bit of difference between French mountain water, Ozark spring water and the fluoride-fortified tap water that's piped to our faucets for pennies a day. Oh, I know, you say you can. But put your money where your taste buds are – especially since we're considering the taste of a flavorless liquid here.

Water is water is water.

Except now its not "just" water. There are Flavored Waters. Vitamin Waters. Sport Waters. These drinks are 99% water with just enough aspartame or crystalline fructose or citric acid or vitamin supplement thrown in to make them marketable. Not a whole lot different than diet soft drinks - which also claim to be 99% water.

The manufacturers of these drinks claim they're helping Americans get their daily dose of water. OK... but most are also giving you a daily dose of other crap that it's either not that great for you or you just don't need.

So are these nouveau waters healthy? Some more so than others I guess, but overall, what's the point? Plop a multi-vitamin and a glass of tap water and save yourself the two bucks and 125 calories in a bottle of Vitamin Water. If you're a professional athlete, by all means, down some Gatorade, but is a bottle of Propel really going to be that dramatically more effective at re-hydrating the average weekend warrior than a glass of water? I think not.

So I'm saving those calories for someplace else, saving the earth (one tiny little plastic bottle at a time) and saving my wallet - all while I get my 60 oz a day. Which, by the way, is not easy to do. Considering I used to knock out a 48 oz Coke in one sitting, I didn't think I'd have any problem substituting water, but it really does take a concerted effort.

That, and a lot more trips to the bathroom.