I’m halfway through my diet, and here’s half a recipe:

Half of a Starchy Soup

  • 4 yukon gold potatoes
  • 1 tbsp butter
  • 4 cloves of garlic
  • 1 onion
  • 8 cups of broth
  • 2 bay leaves
  • seasonings: rosemary, garlic salt, pepper
  • some other stuff

Peel the potatoes and cut them into about half dollar sized bits. Dice the onions into little bits. Melt the butter and crush the garlic onto a large frying pan or a wok. Add the onions and cook for about five to ten minutes until the onions are clear. Dump the onions into a slow cooker. Also dump the potatoes and everything else in.

If you add a pound of lentils and some cut carrots, that’s a lentil soup. If you cook up six leeks with the onions, that’s potato leek soup. Add six cups of cooked chickpeas and half a cup of green chile, and that’s green chile chickpea soup. (The last two soups are best if you hit them with an immersion blender).

Halfway There

Items remaining at week 3

I have trouble tracking my calories at this point because a lot of the food that’s gone isn’t eaten, it’s just been turned into soup. I feel like I mostly planned pretty well, but I didn’t predict well. At the start, I thought I’d be eating salad the second week and potatoes the third.

The lettuce was starting to wilt in the first week, and the potatoes have been looking a little worse for wear this last week. So the salads were done early, and the soups have started early. So there’s a fruit and salad week followed by three soup weeks. I’ll have made four soups before this is done. Each one is food for three to four days.

I’ve got one soup left to make (chickpea green chile). I’m waiting until I have some freezer space from the first three soups. My goal is to hit the fourth week with eight bowls worth of soup, two pounds of tofu, some chickpeas and rice, the blueberries and a little bit of cream.

I weighed in at 195 pounds this morning. That’s one pound less than last week, which was an encouraging but also worrisome 4 pound drop from the start of the diet at 200.

I had a lot of moments of worrying. I look at all the things that are gone, and I still have half the diet left, but from where I’m standing now, I think I’ll have enough food to make it to the last day.