Upsides to the Down Economy/ On HcG and Good Things

Fennel

   I started to write a post about Summertime and the livin' is easy blah blah blah... but who am I kidding? I started the HcG diet Tuesday and have a raging headache and that's all I can think of. The first two days of this diet, you load up on the most fattening food you can imagine- chocolate, eggs and bacon, pastries, fried pork etc... You can also load up on "good" fats, like salmon and avocado, but I didn't do that. At any rate, today is the first day of the 500 calorie phase. I had black coffee and an apple for breakfast, sliced steak over spinach for lunch and a Melba toast (whoopy!) for a snack. Dinner, which of course I have already planned, will be a chicken breast grilled, which has been marinated in garlic, red pepper, mint and lemon juice with romaine lettuce. While it is easy to feel sorry for myself and dwell on the deprivation (especially of wine), I choose to look at it as an opportunity to finish projects that have been lingering and to get my focus on something other than food. It also encourages creative cooking, since there are limited foods available, so I am exploring new ways to use herbs, lemon juice, vinegar, chicken broth and garlic to the maximum flavor possible. For lunch, I made a dressing from roasted garlic cloves, salt, lemon juice and black pepper. It was actually quite good (although a little olive oil would have made it better). Fennel is one of the vegetables I can eat and since I've never really cooked with it, I am looking forward to blanching it, roasting it and using the delicate leaves as seasoning. It is supposed to be good with fish so I plan on trying it with the sea bass, sole, halibut and flounder allowed on the HcG diet. I love shrimp and lobster, especially grilled, and both are on the diet and are perfect summertime foods.  I weigh 128. I somehow gained almost 20 pounds since I got married in 2004. You are supposed to lose between 1 and 2 pounds a day on this diet. I don't really have a goal weight, but will re-assess how I feel at 115 (my old "fat" weight) and then 110, the weight I was 8 years ago. The nice thing about diets is they remind you how lucky we are usually to have such a wide variety of foods to choose from in our normal lives. It teaches us gratitude and self restraint. And, like Martha says, "that's a good thing."