Flat Belly Diet – Jumpstart Day 1

So I started a new diet. I’ll split the chronicle between my normal blog (feelings and thoughts, as always), and this blog (for details on the diet).

Ok, back to business:

The first 4 days of the diet are a strict “jumpstart” diet that is supposed to reduce bloating in general. To see more information about this diet, please read this post: New Diet: Flat Belly Diet.

Here’s how Day 1 went:

Woke up at 4:30am, scrambled to get a few kitchen utensils together to take to work (including a food processor in lieu of a blender, a grater, measuring spoons), caught the 5:30am train, attended a 6:45am meeting, went shopping at 8am (didn’t have time last night, and I was going to be damned if I was going to let that small fact deter me from starting this diet today!). Made it to work by 8:30am, unpacked groceries at work (which took 20 min) and had breakfast.

Jumpstart – Day 1
Source: Vaccariello, Liz. Flat Belly Diet, Pocket Guide. New York, NY: Rodale, Inc, 2009.
My comments in blue

Breakfast (9am)

• 1 cup unsweetened corn flakes + 1 cup fat-free milk
  This was bearable. It had no taste whatsoever… it was like eating slightly wet thin flakes of cardboard
• 1/4 cup roasted or raw unsalted sunflower seeds
  The sunflower seeds I got are raw, outside the shell, unsalted. It took some getting used to these things, but as long as I had them by the handfuls, my mouth was too distracted chewing to notice the bland taste.
• 4 ounces (1/2 cup) unsweetened applesauce
  I thought this would be like a Gerber dinner, but it was grainy… awful texture. I had huge spoonfulls and worked through them as fast as I could!
• Glass of Sassy Water
  I have to admit the water wasn’t THAT bad. I’m not a cucumber person (or a lemon-in-your-water person), but I did not find it completely offensive.

Lunch (1:30pm)

• 4 ounces deli turkey
  The recipe calls for organic, low sodium, roasted turkey. If you found it, more power to ya, but Whole Foods only had either full-sodium organic smoked packaged turkey, or non-organic low-sodium roasted turkey. I figured, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. I got the non-organic kind behind the deli counter. I have to say, I’ll be buying the organic packaged kind in the future… the deli counter type was so dry, it was really hard to swallow.
• 1 pint fresh grape tomatoes
  So, I went shopping this morning, but totally forgot these. So I went to our cafeteria and spent $4 on approximately 2 cups of grape tomatoes. Yikes. These were alright… although they don’t taste as good without salt 😦
• 1 low-fat string cheese
  The highlight of the meal. A much needed dosage of salty goodness. I couldn’t find low-fat cheese, so I got the part-skim mozzarella.
• Glass of Sassy Water

Lunch

Snack (5:30pm)

• Blueberry Smoothie: Blend 1 cup of fat-free milk and 1 cup frozen unsweetneed blueberries in a blender for 1 minute. Transfer to a class and stir in 1 tablespoon cold-pressed organic flaxseed oil or serve with 2 tablespoons sunflower seeds, without the shell
  We don’t have a blender at work, but by 4pm I was so exhausted, I decided to run home and make my smoothie there. It was… interesting. I didn’t use flaxseed oil because I couldn’t find it, so I vowed to have the sunflower seeds… which I forgot to eat in the end (oops). As for the drink, I just drank it through a straw until I reached a really foamy end… that’s where I drew the line.

Blueberry Smoothie

Dinner (9:30pm)

• 4 ounces grilled tilapia, drizzled with 1 teaspoon olive oil
  So it was my husband’s birthday the day that I started the diet, and we went to his mother’s for dinner. I used every tool I had in my box to keep up the strength to not have the delicious pasta dish with meatball and sausage sauce she had made… but I did it! I said Thanks but No Thanks and had nothing to eat. We got home at 9:30, and I was at the brink of a narcoleptic episode, so there was no way in heck I was going to be making all this food for myself for dinner. So, I just made the fish. I added a sprinkle of basil (one of the approved spices), and it was done in 5 minutes. It was delicious!
• 1 cup steamed green beans
  Nope.
• 1/2 cup cooked brown rice
  Nope.
• Glass of Sassy Water
  Nope.

Overall, I’d say Day 1 was alright. Not a complete success, since I was not able to follow it to the letter… but good enough, don’t you think?

ina