Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Portrait of a Marriage

My friend Mandy (you may have heard me mention her, oh, nine hundred million times) does a little series on her blog called Love and Marriage. I always enjoy these inside glimpses and how they highlight the true Mandy and Matt - Matt with his logic and color-blindness, Mandy with her spacial reasoning and love for bright colors. They never fail to make me laugh.

So I'm borrowing this idea from my funny friend. In this little series, Portrait of a Marriage, I hope to give you an inside glimpse into my own relationship. And to highlight the fact that my husband is crazy.

You see, Hugh has a tendency to be...an extremist. This shows up in most areas of his life, but I think it's always most apparent in the way he eats - like the days when he eats 4,500 calorie bowls of ice cream. Which are followed by days where he eats nothing at all.

I, on the other hand, am like a toddler. I'm not really an over-eater, but I do carry snacks with me in my purse. For myself. I call it self-awareness. Hugh calls it self-preservation. I just know I need to eat, preferably every three hours. I also appreciate the value of eating multiple times per day for the sake of keeping one's metabolism functioning in a normal fashion.

Anyway, all this to say Hugh is on a new eating plan. Something about it being the beginning of a new year and him feeling the effects of too many meals like this.

His eating plan is called Johnson's Up Down Day Diet and he found it on the world wide web. He says it's from a blog about evolutionary biology. Between you and me, I think it might be from the world's most accurate source for information: Wikipedia. Because, a blog on evolutionary biology? Oh, yeah, that's a real blog, Hugh.

The eating plan goes a little something like this:

Day One: you wake up and eat a normal breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You aren't gorging yourself, but you aren't eating carrot sticks for every meal either.

Day Two: You wake up and you eat nothing. Maybe you have a cup or ten of black coffee, but you don't eat a darn thing. When dinner time finally rolls around, you eat a normal dinner. You know, twenty three-and-a-half hours after you ate your last meal, you just mosey on into the kitchen and have yourself one regular-sized plate of dinner. And then you repeat: one day on, one day off.

Hugh calls this the Lousy Hunter's Diet. As in, one day you are a really great hunter and you get to eat three solid meals. The next day, you are a not-so-great hunter and you only get to eat dinner. I'll let you guess what I call it.

I am also on a new eating plan. It's called eat at least three servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables daily, stop drinking three glasses of wine every night, and quit eating out for forty percent of your meals. Being the Type-As that we are Hugh and I are, of course, in a competition to see who has more success with their eating plan. Between you and me, I know I'm going to win. I mean I don't want to rub it in to the personwiththetotallyunsustainableeatingplan, but so far we are on day eight and one of us is already back into pencil skirts that have been hanging in the closet, unworn since 2009.

I'll keep you posted, friends...

Postscript: I would like to add a disclaimer. Clearly I think this eating plan is entirely crazy and I in no way, shape, or form endorse it. But, six years of life with Hugh has taught me that he is an adult and is his own boss, and that lecturing him on the importance of maintaining metabolism through regular meals does not have any effect (it make have taken me five years to learn this last part).

1 comment:

  1. Here's my new eating plan: Eat or drink when you can or have time. Puffs, the last half of Sydney's banana, water from Sydney's sippy cup when I left my water bottle at home...

    I like yours better!!

    ReplyDelete