I’ve been hashtagging #DietStartsTomorrow on my fattening food pics for so long now that it feels weird to say “diet starts today”! But it does start today. Started this morning, actually, with half a grapefruit for breakfast. Right now I’m eating tuna (no mayo) and half a cucumber; for dinner, I’ll have ground beef and sauteed onions.

I’ve decided to do a modified version of the diet I lost a bunch of weight on a few years ago. That was the HCG diet: you eat 500 calories per day and you take these (appetite suppressing) drops a few times a day so you’re not really hungry. For the first few weeks, your food options are extremely limited: you get two lean proteins, two fruits (only apples, oranges, strawberries, or grapefruits), and two vegetables (no corn, cauliflower, broccoli, potatoes, peppers, carrots, or mushrooms) a day, and NO sugars, fats, or oils of any kind.

Anyone would lose weight following this diet – after all, you’re hardly eating anything! The drops just make it bearable.

Since I’m not taking the drops this time, I’ve upped my allowed calories to 1,000 per day, and I’m going to expand my vegetable options to include carrots and peppers. (Mainly because I have a bunch of those in my fridge and I don’t want to waste them.) I’ll have to increase my portion sizes a bit so I can hit 1,000 calories instead of 500, but otherwise I’m going to follow the heart of the diet and stick to the “two two and two” rule.

The hardest part for me will be at night, when Dave and I are sitting down watching tv and his son is asleep and I’ll feel like having a glass of wine or a yummy margarita. The margarita is out of the question, of course, since it’s pure sugar, but I MAY allow myself a glass of wine, depending on how many calories I have left after I eat dinner. We’ll see.