Madison Taylor

Saturday, I shopped for clothes.

Needless to say for millions of Americans this isn’t a stop-the-presses kind of event. But in my world, well, it’s huge.

And in more ways than one.

Now usually I avoid shopping for clothes like most do encounters with copperhead snakes or elected officials. I simply hate doing it at all costs. I try to get new clothes for birthdays and Christmas — then wear whatever it is until the shirt or pants in question simply disintegrate at about wash No. 1,000.

Really.

But Saturday I decided it was time to update my wardrobe to match the size I am today, which is noticeably smaller. Since January when I began what I called here my “New Food and Drink Plan” I’ve lost 35 pounds — give or take a pound or two on a given day. It was better than I had hoped and a little more than I planned. But so far, that’s OK, too. In January I weighed 192 pounds. Today when I woke up, the scale read 157.8. It’s about the size I was on the day Roselee and I got married in 1997. Sunday, by the way, I weighed 160.

So at Christmas 2012, I wore size 36 pants and shirts in the process of speeding past large into XL territory.

Enter the Dukan Diet, only I don’t call it a diet. This is because diets fail. I have no immediate plans to fail. Or so I hope anyway.

I’ve written about it before. A physician from France developed this hybrid diet that’s part South Beach, part Atkins and part common sense. It’s meant not just to cut pounds, but change eating habits toward a healthier lifestyle. Lots of lean meat — and I stress lean. This is no all-the-bacon-and-hot-dogs- without-bread artery-clogging fest. That particular diet never made any sense to me at all.

I have now completed all phases of the Dukan Diet and can say I liked it quite a bit. There is very little measuring (what is 4 ounces of steak anyway?) and clear guidelines (no points, no calories). It was easy to follow and relatively simple not to cheat. In the process I gave up a lot of bread (for a little while), pasta, cake, pie, cookies, corn chips, potato chips, pretzels, sugar, potatoes, pizza, burgers and beer.

But that still leaves a lot of stuff to eat and with my spouse’s help, it was tasty stuff: Grilled chicken, fish, shrimp, steak, London broil, turkey, vegetables of all kinds and a little pumpkin desert that really helped beat back the sugar craving.

Now, with a few exceptions, I want to eat this way all the time.

Over the past month or so, people have stopped me in public to ask how I dropped so much weight. “Did you just stop eatingf?” is the most common question.

The answer: Hardly. I get to eat plenty and hopefully will continue to do so.

I’ve been wide open to return to my normal pre-Dukan diet — with some really, really minor modifications — for a couple of weeks. My weight has remained stable at 156 to 161. Three things I have to continue doing: Drink a liter of water or more a day; eat two of the oat bran pancakes my spouse cooks up each morning; and have only protein one day a week. Otherwise, I can eat or drink whatever I want.

But the upshot is, I’m making better choices, staying out of the office snack machine, only having a beer on the weekends and not taking that second cookie. I’ve also learned that 2 ounces of spaghetti is plenty, a good thing to remember when in an Italian family.

Can I stay on this particular plan?

Hope so, after all I just bought some pants at size 32. I hope to wash them a 1,000 times.

There’s a pretty famous soccer announcer who has made a career of calling scoring plays with the loudest and longest shout of “GOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLL!!!! imaginable.

Saturday, I put it much more … modestly.

Goal.

It’s a pretty word, or at least it can be. In this case, I’d say it is. There are times, in fact, when it’s an ugly word. Been there and done that.

But this time, I liked it.

Saturday was when I reached the magic number: 172 pounds. Goal.

It was the target destination for my weight after going on a New Food and Drink Plan — the old non-diet, diet — starting on Jan. 13. Over the past month, I nibbled my way down from my starting point of 192 pounds to the figure I am today.

I dropped 20 pounds on the button as a very devoted follower of the French-based Dukan Diet. My size-36 pants no longer fit and neither do my size 35s. The 34s, what I could wear pretty easily five years or so ago, are back in play. I had planned get down to 175, a nice round number, but the diet book determined that based on my current weight, the number when I was heaviest and the weight when I was lightest as an adult, combined with my age and the measurement of my wrist that 172 is where I needed to be.

OK, if they say so.

Goal.

Which begs the question, what now?

Well, even though I’ve reached my goal, I’m still only halfway home, maybe even less come to think of it. So to be completely accurate, it’s probably “goal, sort of.”

Over the weekend I embarked on what Dr. Dukan calls Phase 3. Readers of previous posts might recall that Phase 1 involved eliminating all foods except low-fat proteins and oat bran for the first week. Phase 2 I added non-starchy vegetables every other day. Phase 3 is still geared toward putting me on a longtime path to eating healthier a little at a time.

So now I can have two pieces of 100 percent whole wheat bread a day (Yay sandwiches again!), one piece of fruit a day and one celebration meal a week in which I can eat what I want. Once a week I have to eat only low-fat protein. I think I can add starch one day as well, but I haven’t worked that out in my head yet.

I’ll be in Phase 3 for a few weeks at least. Afterward, I shift into something more like what I will follow foodwise the rest of my life, theoretically.

That’s pretty much why I refer to this as my New Food and Drink Plan as opposed to a diet. Like I said before, diets are built to fail.

We’ll see.

Last week I sat in a room containing 15 people who were eating pizza with the ravenous abandon of a pack of dogs left in the wilderness for a month.

I didn’t have a bite.

A day later I sat in the same room with about 30 people all wolfing down an assortment of ice cream bars, sandwiches and sundaes.

I didn’t get one lick in.

And Sunday I settled in at game time to watch the Super Bowl contest between the Baltimore Ravens and San Francisco 49ers. I had no chips, dips, nachos, Cheetos, nuts, pizza, bagel bites, ribs, burgers, hot dogs, fries or … beer.

Sigh.

Yes, Sunday I ended the third week of my non-diet, diet, otherwise known as the New Food and Drink Plan. As most might recall, this Dukan Diet pretty much puts the kibosh on carbs of any kind for the first few weeks. I spent a week on low-fat protein only. Then the next two weeks I was limited to low-fat-protein and certain vegetables. I can have the vegetables only every other day. Ultimately other foods will be added as I meet my weight-loss goal.

But the final two phases are there to aid me in maintaining the weight I want. In theory, my eating habits will be changed over time so I’ll naturally shun barbecue corn chips by the truckload, chocolate cake or the odd Snickers bar.

For now, though, I’m still in phase two.

My progress has been very encouraging. I’ve lost 13 pounds over the past three weeks — really almost 14. My goal was to drop 15 to 20 pounds with the idea that my clothes would fit better and that perhaps I could halt the slide of the ever expanding waist size. I’m sure this will come as disappointing news to Kohl’s, Belk and other clothiers who have counted on quarterly purchases by me to keep their sales high.

So far, so good.

This past weekend I was able to successfully tuck a very thick winter shirt into some pants — something I couldn’t do a month ago. And the jowly look developing in my face (my dad’s face really when I get right down to it), is gone.

“You’re starting to get the definition back in your cheekbones, one of your best features,” said my long-suffering spouse, who is the MVP of my efforts. She’s finding a way to put food that tastes good in front of me nearly every night.

Even for the Super Bowl.

Turkey chili anyone?

So is it worth it? I’d say so. Ignoring the pizza last week was easier than it sounds. The ice cream I could take or leave in the wintertime. I’m seldom hungry, which is what the diet founder maintained. Bread and sugar makes people hungrier. A person could nearly eat themselves to death on that stuff and not be satisified.

But I can say this. I’m looking forward to the day when I can have a nice cold beer.

Wonderful, now I can eat broccoli. Oh for joy.

Yes, that was my thinking on Sunday when vegetables were allowed to be reintroduced after the first phase of my “New Food and Drink Plan,” which is in no way a diet. Diets, as I stated in an earlier post, never work. Diets are just plain wrong. Diets require sophisticated systems of weights and measures that someone with a degree MIT would have trouble deciphering. Diets, in short, are for suckers.

But I’m determined this thing of French origin known as the Dukan Diet — just forget the word diet is in there please — will work like gangbusters.

So Sunday I was allowed to have vegetables again after a week of going all protein, which basically means meat or eggs only. I’m talking opulent lunches of turkey, low-fat ham, turkey sausage snacks from Hickory Farms, tuna in a pouch and yogurt. Dinner consisted of grilled chicken, grilled beef, shrimp (not fried, of course), salmon and tilapia.

For breakfast every day I had something known as an oat bran gallette. Pretty much a pancake made with oat bran and nothing on it. My spouse loaded it with cinnamon though, which makes it tolerable. A precise amount of oat bran is a daily requirement of this particular food plan, by the way. It’s about the only one — that and lots of water.

Anyway, this so-called “attack” phase wasn’t so bad. I survived relatively unscathed. And I didn’t cheat, not even once. Never really got hungry, either.

Really.

Missed my beer, though.

So here’s the first week report about my “Non-Diet, Diet.”

Day 1

Weight: 192

After putting away on the previous night what would equate to two meals and a half at our favorite restaurant in town, Prego’s. I’m set to begin. Can’t say I didn’t go out with a bang. I could barely walk out of the restaurant the previous night.

On the first day I drank about a gallon of water, which helps. Had several pieces of sliced deli turkey, a couple of turkey sausage sticks and had a steak and grilled chicken for dinner.

I will repeat this process again and again — day after day.

Day 2

Weight: 185

Holy crap, 185! That couldn’t be right. I was actually panicked. Take me to ARMC, I told my spouse. I’ve contracted some kind of old movie disease. I lost seven pounds in one day! Impossible.

“It’s water weight, dear. Perfectly normal for someone in your situation,” she said, then added, “Believe me, it’s OK.”

Whatever she says. Roselee is the brains in the family.

So I stay the course.

Day 3

Weight: 210

Holy crap, 210!?!?!??? What the hell have I been eating, cinder blocks?

My spouse was at a loss.

“Can’t be right,” she said. “You didn’t eat even a pound of food all day.”

She assured me that the digital scale was not functioning properly. I suggested getting one of those scales like they use to weigh humongous fish at the Big Rock Blue Marlin Tournament in Morehead City if I was going to gain weight at this pace.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll get new batteries.”

My spouse knows me too well. Any opportunity to be silly I’ll grab and run with until the issue is beaten to the consistency of pet food.

Speaking of pet food, by 11 p.m. I have to fight the cat for my yogurt.

 I’m not sure who won.

Day 4

Weight: 189

After going to the bathroom for my morning, uh, sitdown, I noted the revised weight was 187.

“It weighed two pounds?” my spouse asked, incredulous.

“I just supply the information, you make the judgments,” I responded.

Once a journalist, always a journalist.

Day 5

Weight: 188

“I don’t seem to be making any progress,” I tell my spouse.

“What do you mean, you lost four pounds, that’s good,” she says. “You’ve just never been on a diet before.”

“It’s not a diet, dammit, it’s a Food and Drink Plan,” I say in response.

“Yeah, right,” is her retort.

Day 6

Weight: 187

Saturday is usually a date night for us, which means going out to dinner. We rarely eat out on a weeknight. So there’s a void.

Roselee’s suggestion: Go to a movie.

I’m down with that program.

For dinner,  though, she conjures up a dish that is within the boundaries set forth by the inventor of my new Food and Drink Plan. Tilapia and shrimp cooked in a tomato puree with spices.

It’s excellent.

“My body is asking ‘where’s the pasta,’” I tell my spouse.

“Tell your body to just be quiet,” she responds.

After dinner we go see a movie I select. It’s Quentin Tarantino’s violent Civil War era mashup / revision “Django Unchained.” No popcorn, Goobers or Raisinets are consumed in the watching of this bloody film.

I was entertained by the flick, which is pretty typical Tarantino fare. I did feel it was a missed opportunity for the director to make something greater than the usual Tarantino shoot-em-up. He certainly settled for less when he could’ve had more. Still, I liked it.

I ask Roselee what she thought of the movie.

“I’m scarred for life,” she responds.

Next week, she gets to pick.

I foresee some future Lifetime channel epic in my future.

Day 7

Weight: 185

As I said before, “oh goody, now I can have broccoli.”

But we  do a little better.

My body actually craves some vegetables about now. Starting with today, I can have vegetables on alternate days. Back to meat only the others.

I have some spinach, pumpkin soup and ham slices for lunch. At dinner I have a steak, creamed cauliflower, green beans and mixed greens.

I liked it.

Day 8

Weight: 184

Not too bad. Eight pounds in eight days.

Observations:

So far, I like this eating plan because it makes absolutely no math requirements. I don’t count calories, points or fat grams. I don’t need to know how many ounces of meat I consume or pounds of romaine lettuce I can eat. The major thing about the meats — they have to be lean.

So far I haven’t missed sugar. My wife warns if I eat a chocolate chip cookie, though, I’m not likely to stop until the supply at the Chips Ahoy warehouse is emptied.

This is my longest stretch without a beer since 2006, when I went into the hospital for a collapsed lung and was there a week.

Lunch on Day 9, by the way, consisted of turkey slices wrapped in romaine lettuce with a spinach salad and a cup of pumpkin soup on the side.

I can live with it.

Prime example of something not on my “New Food and Drink Plan”, which is not a diet.

—— 

I’ve never been on a diet and have no interest in being on one.

Call what I’m now undertaking, then, a “new food and drink plan.”

Clunky I know. Journalists are hammered almost from birth to write clearly and concisely about any complex subject. Nutrition is a complex subject. Diet, then, would be the shortest point.

But I’m not going there.

Diets, you see, are things that fail. Diets are fads. Diets don’t take. Diets aren’t built for the long haul. Diets consume your personal freedom then spit it on the sidewalk and put the zap on whatever will is left to live.

In short, diets are for other people.

So I’ve never been on a diet.

But going into this year, well, I decided the need to be more compact outweighed my abnormal interest in chocolate chip cookies or barbecue corn chips from the snack machine. Thus, the “new food and drink plan” was born.

I didn’t make this decision lightly — or heavily, for that matter. I didn’t do it to improve my overall health — although that should be the end result. And there was no general order from my physician to shape up. I did it for one reason and one reason only: I’m too cheap to keep buying larger clothes.

My wardrobe expansion actually began years ago, after I finally quit smoking in 2002 — a healthy decision also made because of cost. I put on 10 pounds almost immediately. It was amazing. One day I weighed 175 and the next it was 185 and all I did was remove a pack of Camel Lights from my pocket.

Getting it off wouldn’t be nearly so routine. In fact,  I found the only thing that worked was a weeklong stay in a hospital after my lung collapsed in 2006. Seems a little extreme for a weight-loss program.

And anyway, after I recovered, it magically reappeared the next day.

So in 2002 I went from a 32 in the waist to 34. Bigger, but not tragic. I decided it would be easier and less frustrating to just live with it.

But when the 34s got too small, well, something had to be done. That happened in the fall of 2011 and I spent the first part of 2012 doing what I always used to after putting on a pound or two in my 20s and 30s. I stopped eating so much and bumped up my exercise. Nothing radical, mind you. I cut down on my Zack’s consumption, for example, to once a month. Instead of eating out two nights a week, we only did one. I removed potatoes from my dinner table in favor of brown rice and quinoa. I put away the barbecue chips, a longtime obscession.

After six months, I hadn’t lost an ounce or an inch. On the positive side, I didn’t gain anything either. Like most, though, I got discouraged, put Zack’s back on my weekly rotation, brought extra change to work for the snack machine and began the inexorable slide to Blimp City.

Fast forward to early December. My spouse wrote a story that involved the latest hot diet for Americans starved for such things. It’s called the Dukan Diet and was developed by a guy in France. It’s a supposedly healthier take on a few diets that have been out there for awhile. The twist is in how and what foods are added after the initial zero-carb fest at the start. Supposedly, it’s a plan built for the long haul.

We’ll see.

Monday I got started by gorging on low-fat meat products and washed it all down with about a half-gallon of water. Somewhere in there I had some kind of oat-bran pancake. That’s going to be my breakfast for awhile. I’ll do the meat and oat bran only thing for five days before adding a few vegetables.

The things I give up? Well, it’s scary. Most people don’t realize what they put in their mouths in a given day. Basically anything in the Jimmy Buffet song “Cheeseburger in Paradise” is off limits. I plan to give the snack machine a wide berth. Those doughnuts the publisher brings in every Friday from Paul’s Pastries? Gone. I will have to lose the way to Zack’s. My devotion to the craft beer movement will go on hold.

Ultimately, I can add back some of those items, in moderation. That’ll come after I get off about 20 pounds and a couple of inches off the middle.

So I have embarked on a “new food and drink plan.”

Just don’t call it a diet.

Goodbye old friend. I’ll miss the utter deliciousness of your myriad products with their high amounts of sodium, polyunsaturated fats, artificial coloring and flavoring and glutamates.