I told you I was going to try to be better at posting, and voilà! OK, so seriously. After I left the doc's office I had two conflicting emotions, the first being hope and a real sense of peace and possibilities, and the second one being a sense of panic as I had no idea how to eat balanced meals, let alone a "high protein diet". I called the nutritionist and got an appointment in two weeks(it was today), which left me with the dilemma of what to do in the meantime? Well, my friends, who are mainly in nurses and docs, started carpet bombing me with diets and their interpretations of what "high protein" meant. Internet research uncovered a plan that stated that for weight loss one needs to eat one gram of protein for every pound you weigh! Understandably I was skeptical that eating 305.5 grams of protein was feasible, let alone conducive to weight loss, so I decided to try phasing out the "obvious" foods, like MM's, hard salami, polska kielbasa, tons of American cheese, and popcorn. Well, you can imagine what happened.....I had a "Farewell to my favorite fattening foods weekend!" in which I ate.... you guessed it, all the foods that I was "phasing out". Now at this point, some of you may be thinking, "man , what a dummy!", but I actually thought that the idea was cool, and highly symbolic, so I went for it with gusto. The result, as you may be imagining to yourself, was a couple of days of eating like a madman, and then several days of thinking that I was going to die! On the positive side, however, it has been two weeks, and I have not wanted any of them, so that was cool to me After the blowout weekend, I decided to get serious so I went to store and bought what I considered "high protein foods". Overall I thought I did OK, but I was not able to buy any of the V word items, as I did not consider them to be worthy of the "high protein" team. So I have been working on doing the high protein thing and highly anticipating the trip to the nutritionist.

For me the coolest part about this stage was that I had people coming out of the woodwork wanting to help me, some with moral support, others with wanting to diet with me, so I really felt the love!