To turn into diet burger, remove bun,              chips, and egg

They tell you it’s not a diet, but a lifestyle.  They’re wrong. It has to be a diet: I’m hungry.

Nutritionists advise us to stop eating sugar, not the natural sugars in fruits, but added sugars found in everything from dry cereals to catsup. And my husband and I are both guilty of  being serious sugar snackers.  This is one reason, a week ago, we decided to re-join Weight Watchers. The other was to lose the ten pounds that have made themselves at home in our bellies and are unwelcome tenants.

The Weight Watchers program is reasonable. Who can complain about getting to eat as many fruits and vegetables as you want?  But at the beginning, it’s hard to make the adjustment from bread, pasta, and wine to broccoli, pears, and water. I still have a cupboard full of dark chocolate bars, which make their daily siren call, a freezer of ice cream and frozen yogurt, and a refrigerator with two slices of cherry pie. If I wait long enough, maybe the pie will grow mold, and I will have to throw it out.  Wait!  Maybe I won’t have to do anything so drastic.  My husband just admitted to helping me solve this problem: he has nibbled on the pie over the past week.

Since I’ve been so hungry, I went to my second weigh-in filled with optimism that I was already approaching my goal.  “Congratulations,” said the woman overseeing the scale.  “You did it! You lost a pound and a quarter.” Certain I hadn’t heard her correctly, I asked her to repeat it.  With a big grin, she enunciated to make sure I could appreciate the good news: “One pound and four ounces.” At that point I wished she had mumbled.

So here I am on Day 8.  It’s 2 pm. I’m still hungry.