Day 3 Dinner, or how to cheat

Last night's dinner was a treat, not because I went off diet, but because I had one of my favorite foods: steak. While I'm sure they wouldn't want me to subsist entirely on red meat, I am allowed beef, as long as it's loin, lean chuck, flank, filet mignon, or round cut. Well, strip steaks, a personal favorite, are from the short loin, so I can eat them at will in the diet. To make the meal more notable, I walked to the grocery, going the long way to get 30 minutes of fast walking first, bought my steak, and then walked home. I let the meat sit at room temperature for an hour after rubbing it with a seasoning blend. I cooked it at max heat on the foreman for about 6 minutes, and then let it sit for a minute while I remembered that I needed to weight it. After cooking and having the fat trimmed, a .67lb steak only weighed 8oz.

Cooked perfectly medium rare, the steak was extremely good, and I added fresh ground sea salt before eating. While I've normally ate grilled chicken, I normally added BBQ sauce or ketchup, so this was the first meal that was indistinguishable from something I would eaten before. While I don't want to eat steak every day, for both dietary and financial reasons, having it even every other day will help dramatically to keep morale up.

One aspect of the diet is that "cheating" has worse implications than on other diets, at least in some areas. If you're simply on a low cal diet, and you eat too many calories, you can exercise to make up some of the deficit. On a very low carb diet, I want to keep all carbs out of my diet. So, a cheat of a single cookie isn't just bad for the 100 calories, but also because it'll be the first sugar in any quantity my body will have consumed. Instead, if I cheat by eating, say, an extra half pound of chicken, that's bad, but it's still just protein. In other words, cheating by quantity is far worse than cheating by quality.