ReInventing Fatty Diet: Many Ways To Tie A Rope

As I've mentioned before there are two keys to an effective diet. Water and fiber keep your body happy while you gently starve it of calories. Fiber can come in so many forms: veggies, breads, cereals. You should be taking from all of these sources throughout your day but it is good to have a built in fiber crutch that doesn't require any thought or preparation. For me that crutch is Fiber One cereal. I'd like to show you a few ways you can add this awesome weapon to your dietary toolbox.

First and update: A week into the diet I weighted in at 240 lbs this morning. That's down 5 from my starting point. I'm actually quite happy with that because I have not had good track to run on this week including New Years and all. My saving grace yesterday after a lot of grazing was I had a bowl of Fiber One mixed with Rice Crispies for dinner. I even succumbed to a keilbasa sandwich at midnight with a beer, so you can imagine that I didn't expect to see a loss.

The key to fiber is that it makes you feel full all day. Eaten with a lot of liquid it expands like an overloaded sponge inside of you. Your gut feels guilty from the excess and you are likely to feel like you overate. Meanwhile that fiber is just sliding through you like a long piece of thick rope. As it pulls through it tears garbage from your colon walls that could have developed into polyps, colitis or cancer. This is a way to loss weight and really decrease your risk of disease at the same time.

Here are some different ways to incorporate "Rope" into your menu:

- RopeBurgers. Crush the Fiber One up just a little bit and mix one cup with a pound of ground turkey. Add an egg and a strong dose of your favorite steak sauce to flavor. Make into burgers and cook just like a regular burger but don't go rare at all... think about the turkey. Eat as many as you like but watch the buns. Served over lettuce with balsamic vinegar, you can eat until your pants burst.

- Rope Sundae. Stir a half cup of rope into a cup of your favorite yogurt, I love the boston creme pie. You might have a tough time finishing this it's so filling and so good.

- Rope Cookies. This isn't low calorie but sometimes you want a cookie and this one is WAYYY better than anything off the shelf. Start with a box of white cake mix, blend in a whole stick of butter/margerine, one egg and two tablespoons of water. Now blend in a cup of finely crushed rope and as many chocolate chips as you wish. Make and bake cookies for about 10 minutes. Not low calorie but feel free to experiment with sugarfree cake mix and low fat margerine.

- Tuna Rope Salad. The name says it all. Take salad, add tuna, sprinkle on rope. Viola! Use whatever dressing you like best but it's great with just balsamic vineger.

- Rope Float. How do you make a dead nun float? Take two scoops of dead nun and add root beer. Same principle. Diet pop actually goes really well with cereals. Try a dash of orange soda with your milk.

If some of this sounds gross, that's great. Play with your food. You won't lose weight if you can't live with the menu so make it your own... and don't forget the Rope.

ReInventing Fatty: Water, Water Everywhere...

Everyone who pretends to be an expert on weight loss will tell you, don't look at the scale everyday. It will constantly send you mixed signals. Yes, you can shed 5 pounds one day, only to have it come back the next day. Mostly it has to do with the fact that we are basically sacks of water. Here is a great example from the past two days.

I had dipped a couple pounds out of the gate on my life-altering ReInventing Fatty Diet Plan (any corporate sponsors who want to jump on board early and cheap, send me a line, natch). Tuesday was a superb diet day because I was basically on the road the entire day so I skipped lunch and ate a fantastic ham soup of my own making for dinner. Any kind of soup without cream is a belly buster because you are loading up on one of the keys to a successful diet: water. However on New Years Eve morn I woke up to a horrific 247 pounds! Not only was I up 2 lbs from where I started but I was up four from the day before... YIKES. Not to worry though, good news was around the bend.

This morning, 24 hours after the dreaded encounter with 247 I weighed in at a happy 241 lbs. How the heck did I shed 6 pounds overnight? What was my miracle secret? Listen up and ye shall be wiser by far.

Yestermorning, perhaps an hour after the fateful weigh-in, I took my kids to an all you can eat breakfast buffet which I used and abused. I ate sporatically throughout the day but did skip dinner because the left in the late afternoon for a sleepover. The Reinvented Wife and I then spent 6 hours ringing in the New Year at a casino where I kept my face entertained with Pizza and Sambucca. We capped off our first New Years Eve date sans kids in 12 years with a slimming burger at a Waffle House. I should have woken up like Jabba the Hut ... but instead I lost 6 pounds ... how?

First, the 247 was an artificially high number due to the large amount of salty soup that I ate the day before. Water fills you up and flushes you out but if you also take in too much salt your body will suck that water up and hold onto it for safe keeping. Then I spent the evening binge drinking clear liquor with only a hint of soda water, a natural diuretic. This told my body it was time to squeeze the sponge so to speak. There's a reason you start "makin' water" after the second beer and then you're back in the head every 30 minutes for the rest of the night.

My guess is tomorrow I will be lucky to still be at 241, especially since New Years Day will feature lots of food, occasionally interupted with lots of TV watching from the couch. Perhaps I should wait until the 3rd to look at the scale again.

ReInventing Fatty: Dieting By Addition

First let's get this out of the way. 2 days ago I was at 245 and this morning I weighed in at 243. This may seems like a nice start but keep in mind that the body stores a week of groceries up your ass ... not my opinion, just fact. That's why the typical all-American fat guy, you know, the one who doesn't really think he's "obese", he's just 70 lbs over what "Doctors" call "Healthy, can usually drop 5 - 10 lbs in the first couple days of dieting. Simply put, when fatso stops feeding the beast a lot of luggage gets off-loaded the first couple days. One good trip to the "Pizza Pigout" buffet can put all that junk in the trunk. It is the 2-4 lbs that you lose per week after week one that tell the tale.

The easiest way to make a profound effect on your waist is to add two basic elements to your menu. This is dieting by addition not subtraction. Don't start a diet by intimidating yourself with torturous sacrifice. Instead add elements to your plate that will cause you to lose weight without triggering any martyr complex. Fortunately these two additions that I recommend are cheap and easy to incorporate into any meal: Fiber and Water.

Fiber and water work hand in hand to achieve several excellent dietary benefits. On the subject of weight loss, these two basics in the form of a bowl of Fiber One cereal (I use lite chocolate soymilk) with a big glass of H20, can fill you up with ultralow calories, while satiating your guts desire for protein. Long term, fiber works like a scrubbing pad on your colon, reducing the chances of cancer, infections and zillions of other ills. Since water makes up 90% of our body mass it only makes sense that a steady flow of clean fresh aqua will keep any body cleaner of vile bodily humours than not.

Fresh veggies are a great way to ingest fiber along with all the vitamins and minerals we lack. Feel free to indulge in the tastiest low-cal dips and dressings that you can find, you literally can't overdue the dip if it's clinging to a carrot.

Recentling I discovered a wonderful line of low-cal, high fiber soups from Progresso that give you a whole days recommended minimum of fiber in one can (forget portions, who can eat half a can?) with only 180 calories damage. To put it in perspective, if you could jam 10 cans of this yummy goodness into your mouth each day you would probably still lose 2 pounds a week because it's all water and fiber.

Remember to keep lots of bottles of water in the fridge. You shouldn'nt be able to open the 'fridge without staring at a bottle. Get a nice, reusable 24 ounce bottle and chug one every couple hours, certainly before and with every meal. You simply will never be hungry.

The key isn't to starve yourself. Fall in love with food that loves your body and you will never be hungry again

ReInventing Fatty

I should not have been surprised when I weighed myself this morning. My first, post-Christmas post mortem showed my current tonnage at 245 lbs. That's the equivalent of two of my twelve year old son stuffed into my clothes with a spare Thanksgiving turkey stuffed in there somewhere. My wife and daughter would have to jam in with a 32" flatscreen TV to match my displacement.

Meanwhile gravity has not been kind to me as it's effect has increased. Ankles and knees are still holding up the load but I don't have to listen hard to hear the stress moans. I like to think about my brick house as a sturdy structure but it is as old as I am and I wouldn't want to be living on the bottom floor if two more floors got dropped on it. I won't try to find an analogy for my rapidly melting jowls.

One of the greatest health risks for a stay at home dad is the Incredible Expanding Gut. If your used to working in an office, imagine if they put your desk in the kitchen. Add a stressful holiday where the only outlet for stress is eating and watching sports on TV until your ass sprouts roots and you have a recipe for Diabetes. It's time for me to stop the madness.

Just so you know, I have been on a diet for about 35 years with varying results. Since I have been staying at home with the kids the battle has been more a retreat but I am ready to put all of my years of dietetic knowledge to use. Tomorrow I will unveil the basics of my diet and the results from the first two days. Nothing short of a 50 lb loss will be considered a success but I'll be freaking if I can slice a small canned ham off my belly by Chinese New Years.