The Easy Parts and the Challenging Parts

Just like everything in life, the Dukan Diet for us has it's "easy parts" and it's "challenging parts".  Today we found The Pioneer Woman Cook's blog and wow, do her recipes look yummy!   You may have seen the Pioneer Woman's show on Food Network (we haven't).  A lot of her recipes use a lot of butter and naughty ingredients.  We saved a bunch of her recipes, signed up for email alerts and started to Dukan one of her recipes in hopes of trying it some time this weekend if we have time.

Oh before we forget...a bit of good news.  The male half of this couple started antibiotics for his infected gums and it seems to be helping.  The re-cutting of the gums has been postponed.

Back to the recipe...while Dukan'ing one of the Pioneer Woman's recipes which calls for sour cream and cottage cheese, we thought about how easy it was for us to give up regular sour cream and replace it with fat free sour cream.  Same with cheese, we have no problem using fat free or low fat cheese.  Not cooking  the fattier pieces of beef and pork was a challenge at first, but now we rather eat leaner pieces of meat.  Easy.

The two food items the female half has given up are desserts made with dark chocolate and thick cut french fries.  When baking at home, we have no problem using natural sweeteners...actually we only have natural sweeteners in our pantry since we used those long before we started the Dukan Diet.  It's the times when the desserts are made by someone else...it's been quite hard to say no.  For the male half, peanut butter and chips were the hardest for him...actually he refused to give up peanut butter for the diet, but it didn't effect his weight loss.  He loves peanut butter so he'd probably marry it if that were possible!

During the Attack and Cruise phases, we both followed the diet strictly (except for his peanut butter indulgence which he only has on the weekends).   The "giving ins" started during the last quarter of the Consolidation phase which included two vacations and the holidays.  Kudos to those who have been able to go back to Attack or Cruise successfully because after many attempts, we just haven't been able to go all the way back.

We are still maintaining our weights and when we cook more, we tend to lose a pound here and there.

We're still happy we went on the Dukan Diet.  We are still planning on eating like we're in Consolidation.  After our visitors leave, we will definitely get back to daily exercising versus 3-4 days of exercise.