My Medifast Diet Experience and French Tarts

This isn’t a travel blog post, or restaurant review, but a food post – about french baking and diets.

It all starts with my quest to perfect French baking, in November 2012. I had a burning desire to get these special exquisite desserts mastered in my kitchen -especially French tarts.

I believe the passion began when my mom passed away, November 6. She had been sick for a while, although we had no idea how sick she was, and when she went to the hospital, things went downhill fast. Two weeks later she was gone.

This experience brought feelings of overwhelming sadness, but also a desire to hold on to all things about her that I treasured. This is why I started baking. Many years back she gave me her copy of the Joy of Cooking, because my Dad had bought her a new one, and it was time to pass this on. So out came the Joy of Cooking, some flour, sugar, and butter, and the test kitchen was open.

Well it has been a lot of fun – especially for my co-workers, friends, and family, who were the benefactors of my experiments. I also took a class in french desserts at Sur La Table. I managed to eat quite a few of my creations myself and found myself 20 pounds heavier in just a few months.

This is where I get to the topic of this post – finally – how I ended up on the Medifast diet and how it has been so far. I had no choice but to go on a diet – I hate diets though. After discussing several options with my doctor, we choose the Medifast one as it has worked for so many of his patients. Pretty easy to keep up with as you don’t have to do a lot of calorie counting, they do that for you already. Just grab five packages of “meals” as I walk out the door for work and then cook a gourmet meal for dinner (with restrictions of course). A diet that allows lobster can’t be that bad I thought.

So.. this is what I get to eat: I have five Medifast “meals” a day, which are 110 calories and all equal in nutritional value, and one “lean and green” meal. Just to be clear, I don’t get to eat these tarts in these pictures, or the yummy desserts I made at Sur La Table – this is what got me on the diet in the first place – and what I will have when I am off the diet and 20 pounds lighter.

Two weeks and two days into the plan, I have lost eight pounds. I haven’t worked out much – twice I did the Precor machines at 24 Hour Fitness, yoga once, walked the dog three times and that’s it. I’ll make another post soon, showing a full day’s worth of meals, my weight loss progress, and how it’s going overall.