This week’s rant is in honor of my missus. Ya see, Lisa is trying out a new diet. Now this diet is not just to lose weight. Lisa is diabetic, so this diet is also about getting her blood work in good enough shape so that her physician will stop harassing her about seeing a nutritionist. So the good people at Blue Cross Blue Shield sent her a book with just that – a diet plan for diabetics that not only want to shed a few pounds, but also want (or need) to get their glycosides or glycerides or whatever into shape. So Lisa got into bed one night and started reading… and immediately started ranting.
Which makes sense because this is the stupidest diet on the effing planet! To begin with, this diet doesn’t offer enough calories to keep a woman alive in a concentration camp, much less one in modern-day America. The average diet for a female is 1200 calories (which is bad enough) but it’s how they reach the 1200 calories that amazes me. It appears that instead of taking what people would normally eat and modifying it thusly (which, to me, is one of the reasons for the success of the Atkins Diet), the author decided to figure out what food combinations would hit a particular calorie\blood work target for a particular day and just randomly throw it all together. So the author came up with the following sample menu: “BREAKFAST: 1 egg, poached, 2 green olives, pimentos removed, 1 Saltine cracker, 4oz. skim milk”. YUM! Gimme more of that! Or how about: “SNACK: 1 container low-fat yogurt, 1/8 cup pecans”. I kid you not people – the book actually says “1/8 cup pecans”. So now my poor hunny has to go out a buy a friggin’ 1/8 cup measure (because who the hell has one of those around?) and carry it around with her all day.
I mean, how retarded is a diet book that makes you carry scales or measuring cups with you to lunch?? Imagine if the reps from Big Important Company are in town and want to take you out to eat – and you have to choose between screwing your diet for the day or looking like a freakin’ idiot measuring out everything at the lunch table! Now of course, the bottom line with diets is to cut down on your most grievous eating offenses and actually exercising. But people will never keep up with a diet if it causes them to (literally) starve to death and look like an idiot while doing it – both of which this diet is supremely guilty of.