OPTIFAST - First Meeting Week # 1 March 30 2011

I arrived at the meeting room fifteen minutes early and found two other women waiting.   In walked three women - the Team:

• The Course Instructor (she has a degree in health psychology)
• The Nurse Practitioner (she will monitor the medical side of the program)
• The Administrative Assistant (she takes care of paperwork and ordering of product)

During the first fifteen minutes of each weekly meeting participants will:

• Get weighed
• Have blood pressure checked
• Order products for the following week and pick up the current week's product
• Discuss any health problems that arose during the previous week

The remainder of the time, one hour, our instructor goes over the goals for the next week, provides us with reading material, discuss the emotional aspects of our journey, among other things.

The meeting today was about information gathering and a detail description of the program and the goals for the next 13+-weeks.   This program has been around for decades - I had a friend back in 1980 who lost 100 pounds on this program - it was called the "liquid diet," back then.  She had six specially formulated  "shakes," per day, seven days a week, for six months.

The program is designed to work as follows - Participants must drink 8 glasses of water per day, and  have the option of:

• Drinking four-160 calorie shakes per day or two shakes per day + two meal bars, or two soups,  approximately 640 calories per day.*
• Enjoying 30 extra calories per day, in 10-calorie increments.  Lots of choices here.
• In addition to the program products - participants must each one or two prepared meals per day (see below).

1. To have four shakes* per day and one 500-calorie meal at dinner time;

2. To have four shakes* per day and two 250-calorie meals at lunch and dinner, respectively.

I was not crazy about the frozen meal options because I love to cook and I almost never buy frozen meals.  I like to make everything fresh with little to no preservatives, processing, or fillers.  However, on this program there are very specific requirements, for example, if the 250-calorie lunch/dinner option is chosen it must contain:

• No more than 250 calories,
• No more than 10 grams of fat,
• No more than 700 mg of salt,
• At least 10 grams of protein or more.
                                                            or

We can have one 500-calorie meal per day (usually at dinner) and it must contain:

• No more than 500 calories,
• No more than 15 grams of fat,
• No more than 700 grams of salt,
• At least 15 grams of protein or more.

After the meeting and on the way home, I stopped at my local grocery store and spent two hours going through and reading all of the different frozen meal options!  I bought fourteen different varieties of meals and was thrilled to find a nice selection and they were on sale too!

My goals for the duration of this program is to:

1. Space my "meals," every three to four hours, e.g., a shake first thing in the morning, a shake for lunch (or a frozen meal), a frozen meal for dinner, and then in the evening, which is when I like to nosh, I will have my two meal bars.
2. On the days that I have a 500-calorie frozen meal I will replace the lunch meal with a shake.
3. My daily extra thirty calories will vary from celery or carrot sticks, sugar free gum (5 calories per), etc
4. To walk on the treadmill that we have in the house a minimum of 3x per week.
5. To keep a journal of feelings, especially surrounding cravings and such so I can pinpoint when my food addiction trigger is stimulated.
6. To not be afraid to get on the scale!
7. To enjoy myself and have fun.  Ok, maybe this one is stretching it a bit!

**Shake come in ready to make powder or in a prepared single serving box.  Flavors are vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.  the meals bars are chocolate brownie, yogurt and berries, peanut butter with chocolate.  Soup is in a pouch that you add hot water to, and there are only two flavors, a tomato and chicken noodle.  I am not a soup lover so I opted not to choose them.