Last week Nathan and made the decision to try out the 17-Day Diet. You may call me a hypocrite since I poo-pooed said diet a few months ago, but gosh darn it SOMETHING has to break me out of this plateau and I’m at the point where some behavior modification is needed to get things moving again.
At first I was going to follow the diet to the letter and suffer right along with my husband, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the diet most likely would not allow me to do two things:
- Maintain my current level of physical activity.
- Remain a pleasant person.
Those things are very important to me. I love working out and really pushing myself. I love my spin class, I love the elliptical and I’m even starting to love the burn in my thighs the day after my attempts to jog on the treadmill. While the 17-Day Diet does endorse exercise, the caloric intake most likely would not be able to sustain me through my regular workouts. I’m sorry, but I’m not about to sacrifice my hard-earned cardiovascular fitness level for the sake of a fad diet.
Then there’s Nathan, who not only consumed two Big Macs during a lunch date at McDonald’s this past week but likes the 17-Day Diet plan because it looks to be one in which he can quickly lose weight without having to exercise much.
Slacker.
As for the mood thing, I spent the worst of my depression being a difficult, insufferable person at work and at home and can pretty much guarantee I won’t be Miss Mary Sunshine if you start limiting both my food and my exercise. That’s not to say I don’t need to make changes and some of the principles of the diet, while gimmicky, might help me break the bad habits I still haven’t been able to shake these past two years, such as:
- Drinking too many diet sodas
- Not drinking enough water
- Eating too many carbs
- Dining out too much
- Eating too many processed foods
The soda thing will be hard, especially when I think of the diet Wild Cherry Pepsi I left in the fridge at work on Friday. I heart my diet sodas so much, occasionally drinking up to two 20 oz bottles in a day, but I know they’re bad for me so I’m going to give them up for the duration and switch to the 17-Day Diet staple of green tea and water.
Yay.
As for the rest, you can’t argue with eating clean, unprocessed foods such as lean meats and green, leafy vegetables, all of which we’ll be cooking and consuming at home. The whole fruit abstinence after 2pm is a bunch of bollocks if you ask me and I can already see that as being one of the more flexible tenants of this diet.
The long and the short of it is that I’ve decided to follow this diet along with Nathan while still eating my minimum daily points, logging everything into my tracker and maintaining my current level of activity. I think I may be able to make this work if I view this as a cleanse rather than a diet. I’ll probably miss the carbs as much as I miss my soda, but something has to change. It’s only three months to the start of the holiday season and I need a little momentum to keep me going. The past two years have seen me lose weight between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, and while my goal during that time has always been to maintain my weight, I’d hate to break that losing streak.
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