I find it interesting that despite being a prolific romance writer that I still find it extremely difficult to write about myself. Despite popular belief, the life of a writer makes it easier to hide—your expanding waist and gluteus maximus in particular. Like most jobs nowadays, I’ve spent the last decade with my butt planted in a chair for 12 to 18 hours a day. Not exactly a recipe for getting your heart rate up. And my diet? Forgetaboutit. ( I always wanted to say that.)
But it’s true.
All writers are familiar with the term ‘Deadline Hell’. It means a book is due and nothing else in life gets done—dishes, laundry, hair and certainly there will be no cooking. By process of elimination that means I’m rolling through someone’s drive-thru. And with 5 to 6 projects due a year, I’m always in ‘Deadline Hell’. I can’t blame it all on my profession. I hate cooking—I always have. It takes too much time and requires to much cleaning up afterwards—and all diets require prepping, measuring, and of course, cooking. Dieting overwhelms me. Not to mention my view of portion sizes are severely warp due to decades of eating restaurants portions. Looking back, I doubt I’ve stuck to a diet for more than two consecutive days before I would give up and pull back up in McDonald’s drive-thru.
Time is a precious commodity and I just don’t have enough of it to cook 3 square meals and deal with the extra burden of dishes. I just want to grab and eat and get back to my world of make believe. But things reached a crisis point when the scale rolled past its 300 maximum limit. I had to get a medical scale to read my peak weight of 315 pounds.
315 pounds!
I remember picking up the phone and calling my cousin, Jose and telling her that I had to do something. I had ignored my back pains for too long, I told myself that it was no big deal. When I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, I said, ‘So. A lot of my friends have to sleep with a CPAP machines. No big deal. Then every morning, I started noticing my feet were swollen, like I had spent the night licking a box of Morton Salt. It’s no big deal. So what I’m a big girl. Almost everyone in my family is big.
Excuses, excuses, excuses.
But 315 pounds was hard to excuse.
Real hard.
“Jose, I have to do something,” I remember whining. But what—force myself to do something, I know I can’t stick to?
Lately there’s been an avalanche of TV commercials, promoting meal delivery. But there was no amount of ‘food make up’ that could make those meals look appetizing. I may not like to cook—but I love food.
Next, I visited a very popular television fitness trainer’s website and saw that it was now advertising meal delivery. But how’s the food?
After a lengthy research, it’s seemed like it was a 50/50 split. I don’t know. It sure looks like an awful lot of money. But there was one company that kept popping on online with nothing but rave reviews. I mean I couldn’t find anyone that didn’t like their program. That company was: Bistro MD. I reviewed their site at what they were promoting seemed too good to be true. I called my cousin and we debated for 2 weeks on what I should do. This program would double my food budget. Then it hit me. Aren’t I worth it? Wasn’t getting my health under control worth the money? Could I afford another year of letting my weight get the best of me?
I picked up the phone and made the call. First of all, customer service was outstanding. They were able to answer my questions and assured me that it would be easy to cancel out the program if I didn’t like it. So what the hell? I can afford one week—right? I selected the 7 day with snacks option—mainly because I didn’t trust myself not to order pizzas on the weekends and erase my week’s worth of hard work.
When the food arrived, I was impressed. It looked like everything was prepared in a gourmet kitchen and simply vacuumed sealed and frozen. Not to mention that it all looked great. Turns out: THEY WERE GREAT!
The food is absolutely delicious. Within 2 days the swelling of my feet vanished. By the end of the first week, I was down 10 pounds.
10 pounds!
Talk about motivation to stick with the program!
It’s now been 5 weeks and I’m down 25 pounds!
25 pounds!!
The program is so easy. It completely takes the hassle of counting calories and worrying over portion sizes completely off the table. I still have a long way to go but I have no doubt that with Bistro MD as my partner in my weight loss journey, I will finally reach my goal.
Stay tuned…