When all is said and done, you should never really “diet”. Healthy food choices should be part of your habitual daily routine, as opposed to a new fad diet or delusion of grandeur that switches every week along with your pants size. A cleanse or crash diet will work for about a week, but you will hate yourself and everyone you encounter during it. On that note, here are some suggestions for a diet based on reality.
Breakfast
Upon waking a cup of hot or ice coffee is necessary to feed a burgeoning or raging caffeine addiction. Ideally the coffee would be black, but if you’re going to be a wuss about it choose skim or soy milk. If you need to eat breakfast (because it’s the most important meal of the day, blah blah blah) then do it right. Fruit is ideal, but an all egg white omelet with veggies sounds like a blast and a half. Homemade home fries are also acceptable; they don’t leave you crying on the inside for sustainable food. Carb loading is a G-d given right, and to refuse yourself the simple pleasure is denying the very right to free will, or even love itself.
Lunch
Lunch is a debatable if often overlooked casualty of the day, and during the work week an essential part of your sanity. Sadly, it may even be the high point of the glorious eight hours that put a roof over yours and your many ungrateful cats’ heads.
Once again, moderation is key in maintaining a decent weight along with any reasoning you wish to retain. You need something that will sustain you so you don’t jump over your cubicle in a malnourished rage and attack any ill-fated person who walks by. Unless it’s an intern, as everyone knows they don’t qualify as people.
A hearty salad with falafel, chicken or fish is a surefire winner, as long as it’s not with fatty dressing. That defeats the entire purpose of the salad, and is akin to giving up on a healthy relationship.
Sure, you may be attracted to ranch, but are you willing to cheat on kind and steady vinaigrette? Vinaigrette has always been there for you, even during your lowest points, while ranch was only good for instant gratification.
Dinner
Dinner time serves many purposes. The celebratory meal at the end of a rewarding day, the social niceties of catching up with friends and lovers, the solitary Chinese take-out as you ponder why even your fortune cookie told you to give up. However, one often overlooks the main purpose of dinner: to ingest the proper amount of calories so you can drink as heavily as needed. You wouldn’t run a marathon on an empty stomach, so why not treat a bar crawl with similar respect.
A hamburger or veggie burger sounds delectable, or even some form of pasta in moderation. Hell, go classy and hit up Red Lobster. Something with substance, because let’s face it slugger: you earned it.
Originally published July 2012
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