The Diet

As some of you know, I've been put on a low iodine diet to get me ready for my upcoming body scan. My body needs to be craving iodine so that the radioactive iodine tracer pill that I will take will be gobbled up by any (and hopefully none) remaining thyroid cells. So the doctor put me on a diet for effectively 4 weeks that pretty much eliminates any iodine from my diet. I won't bore you with all the details of the diet but basically I can't eat anything but fresh fruits and vegetables and a little meat that's been cooked at home without iodized salt. I was actually looking forward to starting the diet because I thought it would be a much needed cleansing of my insides. I've gotten kind of fluffy lately and not having a thyroid has made losing weight a little harder. Anyway, the diet started last Monday. My very sweet wife made it her mission to find healthy and creative meals to feed us every evening and bought me good stuff to take to work and eat. I've really enjoyed everything she's made so far. I rocked right along during the week thinking that this was going to be a piece of cake, not to mention I was dropping some pounds in the process as well. And then the weekend showed up. Since it was our first time ever eating all of our meals at home and not just running out for a quick dinner, we didn't shop for enough stuff to cook and actually ran out of stuff to make. Good problem to have but still a problem. So for our Friday night meal we decided to go out to eat with my dad at the only place we could think of that I could eat. We went to this salad place in Peachtree City and it's really pretty good. Except for the fact that I can't actually eat any salad dressings that I like. So my salad with oil and vinegar was pretty sparse and not very appetizing, but what are you going to do. Then Saturday rolled along and all I have to say is, just damn. We took our kids to Chick-fil-A for a treat for being such good troopers with the menu this week. They had nuggets and fries and I had a fruit cup with rotten grapes. So then after a few errands we had to go grocery shopping to stock up for the week. By this time it had been about 24 hours since I had eaten any real protein or anything with any substance. Walking through the grocery store looking at aisle after aisle of crap that I couldn't eat was making me hungry. And I mean really hungry. Like hungry enough to get a second helping of the Swedish meatballs at church on Wednesday night hungry. Hungry enough to eat green bean casserole. Hungry. And now I was getting really irritated too. I'll admit it, I was a big ole grumpy bitch. And we were shopping at Publix in Tyrone, which I hate. I hate that store. So now I'm hungry and in a pissy mood and trapped in a place that I hate. I could have blown a gasket at any moment. But, my wife was very tolerant and sympathetic to my situation and when we got home she made me some guacamole and cut up some fresh watermelon for me to eat. Then a little later she made some chicken for an early afternoon snack. That really helped a lot. So here I sit on a Saturday night craving a big greasy pizza with lots of meat and cheese but realizing that what I'm going through will all be worth it in the end. At least on this diet I can drink beer. So here's to a sweet wife and homemade guacamole. I'm heading to the fridge for a cold one.