Day 1

Today is day 1 of the Beck Diet Solution and my first 24 hours of being vegan.

The Beck Diet Solution is a cognitive therapy based sort of diet/diet book written by my second cousin, Judith Beck, daughter of the founder of cognitive therapy, my great uncle, Aaron Beck. So clearly the family pride has some sway in getting me to try out this diet book. It's all about changing how you think about eating and resisting the cravings to eat food you know you really don't want to be eating. Granted, I don't have a huge amount of weight to lose, but my petite body has not faired well against the ravages of entering adulthood. I've gained 20% of my body weight since I started college 4 1/2 years ago and I want to reverse this trend. The first two weeks of the diet plan aren't on an actual diet, but are spent building the tools to succeed with a diet. For my diet, I've decided to be vegan. In the first two weeks, I'm going to try to eat primarily vegan, and then go strict on May 1st.

My decision to eat vegan came about through the combination of boredom at work and the discovery of some pretty great vegan food blogs. Fat Free Vegan Kitchen (http://blog.fatfreevegan.com/) was my initial and main inspiration. I decided to go vegan for the culinary challenge of cooking delicious and healthy food, on top of the regular ethical reasons that probably most vegan have.

So as part of my first day on the BDS, I made my response card that list the reasons I want to lose weight. All standard, but I think having this written out to read to myself when I'm having cravings or in stressful situations will really help.

And most importantly, for day 1 I ate:

Breakfast: soy sauce and rice vinegar sauteed tempeh sandwich on a half of a whole wheat pita with cucumbers, tomatoes, jalapenos and avocado. So good.

Snack: chopped cabbage with horseradish mustard and cider vinegar marinaded for four hours.

Lunch: veg bologne with melted soy cheese, gherkins and whole grain mustard on the other half of the whole wheat pita.

Snack: one dried tamarind.

So far very good, but I'm already feeling myself getting hungry and I have three hours left of work and at least four hours until dinner. I have an orange left for snacking on and I hope that can hold me over with the help of reading of the response card.