The Slop Diet: An Exercise in Eating

It's a story frequently told both on and off the intertron: girl feels she's overweight, girl loses weight, girl gains weight back slowly over a few years. Your heroine finds herself, today, at the "gained back" point. I'm not -as- heavy as I once was, but at about ten pounds off my all time max, things are a little rough. I found myself, recently, going back through what helped take the weight off in the first place; being a few years younger certainly helped, but the major factors as I saw it were that I exercised a lot more, and I counted calories pretty religiously.

One of my biggest successes back then, I think, was that I focused my calories in the first half of the day, and had smallish dinners. According to a nutritionist friend, one burns most of one's calories in the first 12 hours during which one is awake. Thus the idea: why not have a tiny, nutritious dinner and big, filling breakfasts and lunches?

The problem then became: what to eat for dinner that was small, filling, and healthy enough to keep me from feeling like I'd eaten a hunk of cheese and called it a meal? I experimented a bit and oatmeal wound up the winner.

Now, I know I'm not the only person who's ever eaten oatmeal for dinner and called it a diet. Regardless, it worked, and now I'm trying it again. This time, I've branched out to add in cream of wheat, polenta, and grits to the mix, since oatmeal on its own can be more repetitive than the music at a mid-90s rave. The goal is to have something slop-based, i.e. that it needs to be in a bowl or it'll go all over the place. Various types of gruel kept peasants going for centuries, it'll certainly keep me going when used for a single meal.

I'm starting this blog a little late in the game. See, I should've written this three weeks ago, when I started on the slop diet. I didn't think of it then, though, so now it is.

Tonight's slop is going to be steel-cut oats with a dash of honey and cinnamon for flavor. Yesterday was a non-slop day (gardein santa fe "chicken" breasts and quinoa), and the day before was cream of wheat with 1/2 tbsp of butter and salt. Tomorrow'll probably be polenta with habanero salsa.

And so it begins, the documentation of the slop diet.

To get really voyeuristic about my eating habits, check out my livestrong profile.