Hump Day

Today is Wednesday, Day 3 of my South Beach Diet… or as my suffering beer belly prefers to call it, “55:18:32 Hours Without Pizza or Beer”.

Yes, it’s Hump Day.

They say that if you can make it past the third day‚ and make it over the hump‚ you can make it long term. I hope that’s true because I’d hate to think I gave up drinking beer and eating Big Macs these past few days for nothing. You just can get those meals back.

I was raised with a Midwest mentality where unless you are served a slab of meat and a huge baked potato you haven’t eaten. (Oddly, no one in my family is from the Midwest. Go figure.)

I have a hard time feeling full unless I eat something hearty. When I was a kid, the only time we ate salads was when we went out to dinner‚ and even then it was just something small to tide you over until the real food came out. I’d always order French salad dressing and only eat the lettuce. Mom usually finished off the tomatoes, cucumbers and mushrooms. That stuff was weird. At least I was familiar with lettuce because McDonald’s used to put that on my Big Macs.

And even today I think the following holds true: men eat meat, women eat salads. If you go to a restaurant, you’ll see that the men are ordering prime rib and the women are ordering fish or Caesars salad.

Which leads me to this evening.

Tonight I ate dinner at the Soup Plantation. By my count I was only one of seven guys in the restaurant and I’m assuming that I was the only straight one of the bunch.

I had lettuce, cabbage, cucumbers, cauliflower, kidney beans and mushrooms. Oh, and water. That’s like going to a buffet and only eating the cheap stuff… it goes against everything I stand for!

Oops. Gotta run. All this fiber has given me a new hobby.