January is the month for dieters. As many of us return from a couple of weeks groaning at the holiday boards, we gaze with shock at our increased mass and resolve to shrink ourselves to our former sizes, post haste.
Myself included. According to a Gallup Organization poll, I am one of the forty-one percent of Americans who consider themselves overweight or obese. Like many others, I have tried diets, exercise plans, fitness regimes, weight-loss facilities, and just plain white-knuckling to remove extra flesh from my frame. But all for naught. I still have a body built for famine. Whenever the food apocalypse comes, I will be sitting pretty while the five percent of Americans who told Gallup they are underweight fall emaciated along the road.
But The Husband and I have seen at least a glimmer of hope since the beginning of the year. As part of our attempt to prepare for life in Spain, we have begun to eat in a more Spanish or Mediterranean fashion, mainly to eat more fish and change our meal schedules. Starting January first, I served our largest meal between Noon and 1:00 PM and prepared a much smaller meal for the evenings, usually a fillet of some fish and a vegetable side dish.
This was harder to achieve when the Husband had to go to work back downtown again, but we have stuck with it. I have tried to make sure his tiffin lunches are larger and provided food for a snack when he gets home about four P.M. e evening repast small but tasty in the tapas tradition.
So, how's it going? We both think the experiment is proceeding very well. Admittedly, the Husband is pretty hungry when he comes in, but not to a level that some good snack can't ease, and, more importantly, we are both making ourselves smaller. According to the scale photographed above, I have removed a bit more than four kilos from my frame, or almost ten pounds, since January first, and the Husband has drawn nearly five. (I'm not surprised he has removed less weight than I, with more to pull, my weight removal is more accessible.)
Notably, we haven't banned anything from our diets. We have already sought to keep sugar consumption in processed foods to no more than five grams per serving. Still, we kept the habit of sharing two cookies from our neighborhood bakery on the weekends and not sacrificing flavor to cut calories. We still removed weight, but because we have taken to eating our largest daily slug of calories early in the day when there are still plenty of things to do and think about, not because we went on some food restriction plan.
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