Dunkin' Donuts, Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut -- Strange Way to Start a Diet

Tomorrow I start Round 2 of the Beta HCG Diet. For a week, I've been planning for my first two days on the diet. I've been plotting my ice cream (Baskin-Robbins pralines 'n cream), my donuts (Dunkin' Donuts), my pizza (Pizza Hut because it's closest), my sausage for my omelettes (Jimmy Dean maple flavored), my cookies (Pepperidge Farm soft peanut butter) and my chocolate (Milky Way fun size).

On a diet???

Let me back up a minute....

I finished Round 1 the day before Thanksgiving. I couldn't eat any starches, sugars or grains for three weeks after that and have been eating whatever I want ever since then. And, amazingly enough, I weigh exactly what I weighed after 40 days on the diet during Round 1. Which is to say that I'm down 25 pounds from what I weighed in September. Fabulous!

Tomorrow morning I start applying the HCG cream once a day. After enough of it gets into my bloodstream, after three applications, I'll be living on a mere 500 calories a day for the next 40 days. I will eat from a very limited list of four kinds of foods: proteins, vegetables, fruits and a tiny bit of starch in the form of Melba Toast. But I won't be hungry. The HCG releases the fat from abnormal fat cells (the fat we don't want) to make up the difference. So the diet calls for loading up on fats for the first two days. Gorging, in fact. Exactly why is complicated so I won't go into it. (For the entire explanation of the diet in the words of the man who originated it, click here.) I just know from Round 1 that it all works.

During Round 1, I stuck to the letter of the diet for the entire nine weeks -- six weeks of "diet" and three weeks of anything except sugars, starches and grains. The regime reset my "set point," the weight I stay at more or less no matter what. My default weight, if you will. And it worked for me. So I'm back for Round 2 to lose another (hopefully) 20-25 pounds. All under the watchful eye of Dr. Pieter DeWet, a holistic physician.

Since it's supposed to be icy-rainy tonight into tomorrow, I loaded up tonight. It's all in the kitchen waiting for me. I've sampled a few of the items tonight, just a few bites, but am saving the mandated "gorging" for tomorrow and Tuesday. I'm looking forward to being able to eat everything in sight, but I know from Round 1 that by the second day, I'll be oh so ready to end that.

What I'm really looking forward to is being back on the program, feeling healthy and losing more of the way-too-many pounds I've managed to gain over the last two decades. I'll blog about it all as I progress, as I did the first time around. Cross your fingers for me!