A large box arrived at our house yesterday and when I came home from work my wife and my five year old had divided all of the packages into 4 bags of food. They were the color coded using the NutriSystem packaging -- Blue for breakfast, Green for lunch, Pink for snacks and Red for dinner. My suspicions are raised slightly about portion size as 28 days worth of food fits into three paper grocery bags. I am slightly re-assured by my ability to add fruits and vegetables, but even so...
The next day it is time for the first meal - breakfast. My son reaches into the breakfast bag and out comes a very small package of cereal in a plastic bowl. Sugar corn puffs it is not. That being said, I add a little bit of milk and attempt to ignore the chuckling of my significant other as she watches me savor all four ounces of milk and 1 cup of bran cereal. Whew - I am so full!!
About 10 o'clock I am starting to get pretty hungry. Go to get a cup of coffee in the breakroom and I encounter my first test. Someone made soft chocolate chip cookies and put them out on the table for the office. They look good, real good. I get my coffee and beat a retreat from the room of temptation. An apple down the hatch and then thankfully I get really busy at work until about 1:30.
So I missed my regular lunch time and am now very hungry. Out comes the black bean soup meal. Hmmm...This bowl looks pretty small but you never know. I walk past the now half full plate of cookies to the microwave. Instructions: Shake the contents, add water, and put in the microwave at 50% for two and a half minutes. We have the weakest microwave in the office in history, so guess what happens? After two minutes at 50 percent power the soup has boiled over and coated the microwave. Now this is bad on two fronts - one I have to clean up the microwave and two I have lost at least a tablespoon of soup. The cookies are still staring so I get a little bit of coffee - it is the dregs of the pot, but how bad can at it be? Turns out - pretty bad, but at least my soup is boiled so with a supreme effort I leave the plate of cookies once again and head for my desk with soup in hand.
They weren't kidding about needing to stir the soup and shake the contents. So my soup is completely black and I have a tar like substance sticking to my spoon. I stir and stir and finally peel the tar off of the spoon and then let the soup cool. Eventually it is cool enough to eat and I am greeted by my first real pleasant surprise of my NutriSystm experience. It may look like tar and be black as ink, but it actually does taste like a passable black bean soup. May be there is some hope. I await my snack of Sour Cream and Onion Chips eagerly later.
4:30 p.m.- Time for my snack - I tear open my chips. At first taste I realize they are missing something - salt - and also that they are a little chewy more like a rice cake than a chip. So after looking I see that there is salt, but not much and that they are made of soy. Initial disappointment is rapidly overcome by hunger and as I am licking the inside of the bag for the last of whatever salt is in there, I decide that lightly salted soy cakes are not that bad. Two hours to dinner.
6:30 p.m. - Dinner time - I am ready for a real meal now. My son reaches into the bag and out comes pizza. Now you're talking. Wait a minute - portion size has struck. I think that it would be most accurate to describe this as a pizza cracker. Sauce, cheese and a piece of flat bread. I would suggest that no one has ever taken smaller bites while eating pizza in the history of eating pizza than I did.
Drank a lot of water the rest of the night and also had some fruit. After some adventures, I made it through day 1 OK. I think I can do it - 27 days left.
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