Special K Diet: Day 2, Bowl 1

Ok, so about to consume the first bowl of Day 2's Special K cereal allotment. (Technically, going to eat it after I read The Upper Room story for the day.)

Didn't the Special K diet used to be simple? Something like, substitute one bowl of cereal in place of one meal. Or, eat one bowl before going to bed instead of a pint of ice cream. I don't know exactly.

I do know I didn't expect this: 7 kinds of cereal, 2 flavors of waffle, 3 meal bars, 2 snack bars, 6 cereal bars and 7 flavors of Special K "protein water," which just sounds disgusting but whatever.

Are they kidding me??? If I want to spend the time to buy that many different bars and beverages, and mix and match them throughout the day, I might as well just grocery shop and cook!

They even acknowledge on the "Getting Started" quiz page (not much of a quiz--3 questions) that one reason people have trouble losing weight is because we skip meals, eat the wrong things, are busy... why do they think that is, because we took the time to prepare a healthy dinner and then some mysterious project prevented us from eating it? No!

It's because we don't want to figure out which cut of meat to buy, look up a recipe, hope we have all the spices, and buy some vegetable that will go nicely with it. But that's not much more work than picking 5 cereals, 4 bar flavors, and 6 waters! (And probably cheaper.)

Especially because (and maybe middle America won't have this problem) I seriously doubt any one NYC-area grocery store is going to have all or even half of that stuff!

I'm going to do cereal-only. The closest grocery store has at least 4 flavors of that, so I'll be set there.

I just Googled soy milk with it, because the K site itself is nothing more than an advertisement for the many varieties of Special K products, it has no helpful info like, What if I don't drink cow's milk can I still do the diet... There is a forum on the site, but I found it hard to find anything there. So.

My search results turned up the fact that soy milk is fine. I'm thinking it's better than rice milk because the rice milk is low protein and I'll be starving.

I also found this great review, which is actually a few years old. There may be more research now and the special bars and water may help you lose more weight, but this gives me a good reality check. I quote:

"If you currently have a poor diet, but substitute it with our cereal - you may lose 4.4 pounds over the first two weeks. You will be probably feel very hungry while restricting your calories, and will may find eating cereal for dinner or lunch to be untenable after a while. Boredom could well set in. History shows that a low-fat, higher-carb diet can work, but in the long run it may backfire".

Well, my diet's pretty poor, and a big part of it is simply eating each meal and knowing psychologically I'm done with it, so I don't snack in between. And I avoid eating DB's stuff when I'm mindful of what I put in my mouth.

And, having only eaten cereal all day, it sure made dinner taste good last night... AND got my butt in gear to actually cook the cauliflower in the refrigerator!

So that can't be bad.

Accountability time: Starting weight, 150.
Goal weight for 2 weeks, 145.