Beginning the diet

I wrote last week about commencing a diet; I could start some parts of it immediately but other parts required a little time to be organised.

The first thing that enters my mouth in the morning is a glass of cold water with freshly squeezed lemon juice. This isn't as unpalatable as I had expected, but it doesn't "do" much for me. After that, I have yoghurt as before, but instead of three spoonfuls of granola (which apparently are a high calorie source), I have two spoonfuls of flax seed. I bought this in a 'healthy' supermarket when I was in the Haifa bay area on Thursday. As opposed to the picture on the left, they were selling it loose - and very cheap. I miss the crunchiness of the granola and the seeds tend to stick in my teeth - but hopefully the change will help me lose weight.

After yoghurt, I used to eat a slice of wholewheat bread with peanut butter - again, very nutritious but also full of calories. I have cut this out completely and so far it hasn't seemed to matter. During the morning, I munch on a cucumber or peach should I become hungry. Strangely, I haven't been hungry at all, except on Friday morning. Does this mean that I have been eating too much?

Lunch is as it has always been for the past year or so, a stir-fry consisting of chicken breast and seven or eight vegetables, all chopped up and cooked. I normally cook a batch on Saturday night and work my way through it during the week. Most weeks I add turmeric to the food, which naturally makes it yellow. I had thought that this spice didn't contribute anything to the taste, but there was a week when I had run out of turmeric and that week the food was distinctly tasteless. I stocked up on the spice in the Haifa supermarket on Thursday only to find it in my local corner shop on Friday.

The missing piece of the diet was the evening meal, for which I had been recommended to eat quinoa (here in Israel, it is pronounced ki-no-a, but I understand that elsewhere it is pronounced kin-wa). For some reason, I had thought that this was eaten uncooked, a form which looked distinctly unpleasant, but after reading about it (for some reason, the quinoa had slipped my mind otherwise I would have bought some of this as well in the supermarket), I bought a bag of it in the corner shop. I cooked it like rice - first fried a diced onion, then added a cup of quinoa and two cups of boiling water with some chicken flavour soup powder and let it simmer for 20 minutes - but the result was far more tasty than rice in my opinion. I've just been reading about the nutritional properties of quinoa and it seems that this should definitely become a staple of my diet. I'm going to cook it instead of rice on Friday night - it will be interesting to see what the children say, even though I can guess right now.

The other main change in my diet is no milk (apart from the yoghurt) and much drinking of water. It helps that the weather is hot as this encourages me to drink. I calculate that I am drinking about 3.5 litres of water (some of it as herbal tea, some as lemon juice) a day, causing commensurate visits to the toilet. Whereas before I would drink maybe only one cup of tea after returning home from work, I am now drinking that cup along with four or five glasses of water.

I have refrained from weighing myself so far. Next Sunday, I will have the stitches removed from my back after my minor operation, and then I will weigh myself in the clinic. It will be interesting to see what the results are.