My life on ediets

I figured I'd just blog this. I thought I'd already addressed my ediets plan, but looking back it seems it's not very clear or easy to find.

I joined ediets.com on March 28.

What I love about ediets is that they pretty much do the hard-work of meal planning for me. There are multiple diets you can choose from (Atkins, Body-for-Life, Diabetic, Mediterranean, etc...) When I joined I took a questionnaire and they put me on the Glycemic Impact Diet. This diet is designed to use foods that don't trigger increases in my blood glycose levels, which I believe cause me to crave and overeat.

Ediets has predetermined that I will eat a certain number of calories for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and 2 snacks. However, I get to pick which meals I want to eat. There are two versions to this plan - convenience and recipe-based. The convenience meals are supposedly easier and faster to put together (although many of them involve salads and chopping vegetables isn't what I'd consider most convenient.)

The convenience meals can involve a lot of frozen meals like Lean Cuisines, but because of the added salads I don't usually find them to really be more convenient than just heating up a fish fillet and some zucchini, for instance, which is generally going to taste better anyway and use better quality ingredients than most frozen dinners. But either way, the point is, I can decide for myself.

And frankly I don't think the recipe-based ones are all THAT inconvenient. Some meals appear on both lists.

So, basically, I weigh-in once a week at ediets, and based on my result, they decide whether to modify my caloric intake or whatever (I don't really know if they've done this or not, I think when I started I was on 1800 calories and now I seem to be on 1500 - not sure - I haven't really had to think about it much.) Then they give me a meal-plan, in which they seem to randomly assign meal choices. I always edit the choices, because if I eat a different meal every day my grocery bill will be through the roof. So instead I try to eat the same thing two or three days in a row, and make three days worth of dinner at once. This saves me time and money, but the process of changing the meals is arduous.

Once I've settled on my meal plan for the week, I can print out a grocery list and I can print out my meal plan. Then I just go grocery shopping, come home, put it all away, and I'm ready for the week.

Ta-da. So they do the thinking for me.

One day when I start trying to figure out how to eat on my own without ediets, I think I will put together a booklet of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that I can mix and match and try to be a little more autonomous.

Now, I have been reminded that they have some issues - the website is not particularly user-friendly, and there are some customer service issues. I remember in my past, when I wanted to quit ediets, I pretty much just changed my credit card number rather than count on them to stop billing me. yep.

So - this morning, I had Ricotta cheese with raspberries and two pieces of whole wheat toast and a cup of skim milk for breakfast. Then for snack, ham and apple salad (with green onions to make it irresistible) which I'm having all week for snack, for convenience's sake. Lunch is going to be a veggie burger with spinach salad, soy milk, almonds and fruit. 2nd snack is going to be a "salad" of two boiled egg whites and a tomato with salad dressing and three low-sodium wheat thins. And for dinner, a I'm packing a cheeseburger (I made 4 a few days ago) with salad and cantaloupe.

Lots of good, wholesome foods. I do like that. I am paying more for food now than I was before. Sucks since I don't have any income right now.

I figure that as I get smaller and my calorie allotment reduces, I'll be adding less fruits and almonds to the main meal, but we'll see, I'm not there yet.