Breakfast and snack: Veggie quiche cups for breakfast and some edamame and a fresh plum as my morning snack.
Lunch: Salad with grilled chicken at Baja Fresh. This is absolutely delicious, huge, and needs no dressing besides some of the pico de gallo. It has some tortilla strips mixed in, but there were few enough of them that I didn't bother to pick them out.
Choosing the Right Chocolate: By afternoon snack time I detected a chocolate deficiency. I went into the little store at work where they have a big selection of candy. I checked the ingredients on my favorite - the Peanut Butter M&Ms. Yikes - they have evil trans fats in those! The mini-Snickers looked like a good way to satisfy the chocolate craving, but they also have trans fats. Then I read the Dove Bar Dark ingredients - those fit the guidelines, with bittersweet chocolate and no obvious trans fats. The trans fats show up as the "partially hydrogenated" oils. Avoid those. OK, they can force me to eat Dove bars - they are the same price as the M&Ms anyway. I ended up eating half of the bar - I tried to stop at 1 square but it kept calling to me. No great harm done. I also had some edamame salad before eating the chocolate to keep the glycemic index in bounds.
Dinner: I defrosted some cooked shrimp in the microwave in some Paul Newman's Caesar Dressing. Then I made a salad of romaine lettuce, garden tomatoes, shrimp, and a lime juice-olive oil-dijon mustard dressing (since I had used up all of the caesar dressing). For dessert I had a non-fat fruit yogurt as Phase 2 allows.
Phase 2 Summary for the Day: I had a fruit, an acceptable milk product, and acceptable chocolate for Phase 2. For a starch/grain, the few tortilla strips in the salad could be counted. They aren't the best choice because corn flour is higher in glycemic index. But it was a very small portion eaten with a giant bowl of lettuce, tomato, and grilled chicken.
Weight result next morning: down a couple of ounces.
Day 20
Breakfast: Veggie Quiche Cups.Lunch: I was on the road and the only convenient fast food stops were Burger King and Taco Bell. But I didn't know what was best to eat there, so I stopped instead at a grocery store and bought a packaged salad. I later researched what I could best eat at the major fast food restaurants.
Best Fast Food Choices for the South Beach Diet
Snack: I finished off the Dove bar and discovered that edamame in the pod can get moldy after a few days. Oh well.
Dinner: Grilled ribeye steak, grilled vegetables, salad, and red wine. The wine went right to my head.
Day 21
Another day of diet challenges. I had my usual Veggie Quiche Cups for breakfast. But as I needed to run to catch a ride to a meeting, I couldn't get to my diet choices and instead I bought a packet of Peanut M&Ms from the snack machine. I was very hungry and just couldn't go without something. I was happy to read on the packet (as I did in the South Beach Diet Book) that it didn't list any obvious trans fat, and the peanuts help lower the glycemic effects of the sugar.Pizza, Hold the Crust: At 10 am I had a meeting where they brought pizza. Two of us were on low carb diets and, having warned the meeting chairman in advance, we just ate the toppings off of the veggie pizza and the combo pizza and didn't eat the crust. It was pretty good that way.
Dinner: I had a salad and an Ethnic Gourmet frozen dinner, Indian spinach and paneer. I discarded the rice portion and dipped the spinach with pita chips. Delicious. Then I read the rice was brown rice and OK for a Phase 2 carb, but I don't like the rice in frozen dinners anyway.
Next Page: Summary for the Week
