Five days, including today, since my last update. Five. Days. My only excuse?
Doubt.
Fair warning, this is gonna be a long entry, seeing as how it covers five days ^_^
I've been battling the desire to quit since Thursday (day 8), and I can't say that it's been any easier as the days go on. I've been trading emails with a pretty amazing cust serv rep at MHP over the weekend, and while she's done leaps and bounds towards easing my doubts, I'm still struggling with the restrictions and unanswered questions behind the protocol. Among other things.
Perhaps I should start at the beginning. When you first research the program, it's generally billed in installment periods of the drops themselves: 26, 43, or 60 day programs. What they don't tell you, is realistically, it's however many days you're on the drops, plus a minimum of six weeks of Maintenance, provided you manage to stabilize your weight every week. In the guides, they even tell you that more than half of the people who do this diet fail to stabilize their weight in the first three weeks. That would have been a nice piece of information to have before I started this thing.
I'm on the 26 day plan. 23 days of drops, the first two being load days, and then three days of VLCD diet with no drops so the HCG can work it's way out of my system. That's just shy of three weeks. Once the main portion of the protocol is done, it's another six weeks, minimum, of Maintenance, where I'm still limited on what I can and can't eat, just on a grander scale. That means, all told, that I'm looking at at least two and a half months on this thing.
Read it people: 2 1/2 months.
You might ask, why, if I've been reading the guides and logging the data, I didn't realize this before now. And why does it all of a sudden matter?
Life.
When I first started the diet, I'd planned out my schedule for the 26 days so I'd be free and clear of them in time for some social events happening in March. What I'd forgotten to plan for was my photography job. My first shoot is this weekend, and it's an overnight shoot. Kinda hard to make my own lunch and dinner if I won't have access to a kitchen. I shoot straight through on the weekends until the end of March, with one more overnight shoot scheduled so far. With my job though, things can change in a heartbeat, so I can't even bank on that.
Thankfully I'll be on my last week of the drops by this weekend, and next weekend will by my first week of M1, so that one shouldn't be too bad. It just threw all my plans for a loop though, and got me thinking about the commitment I'd unwittingly made when I started this protocol.
Friday - Day 9 - saw me sending in an email asking what the consequences of quitting the drops would be. Saturday - Day 10 - saw me venting all my frustrations with the program, from the commitment to the lack of recipes to the holes in the guides. Sunday, I received the amazing email from the amazing MHP rep, and today, I'm contemplating my options.
To date, I've lost 13.4 pounds. I still don't fit into any of my old clothes, but I have to look at the big picture. The clothes I wore a month ago, fit better today, and in another month, they'll probably fit even more better. I'm handling the hunger pangs with little to no fuss or side effects beyond the occasional feeling of weakness and shakiness. I've saved money, by shopping for less food, and I've spent more quality time at home in the last two weeks than the last two months, probably. There hasn't been much in development aside from the doubt over the past five days, and there hasn't been much in physical representation of the diet other than the weight loss (which, really, is how it's supposed to be, right???).
All things considered, I'll stay on the protocol and finish it out, more so because I'm almost done (it would be kind of stupid to quit this far in) and because I don't really have any other choice other than to watch as the pounds pile back on. That being said, if I'd paid better attention to the honest time line, and just what it would entail real world wise, I don't know that I would have embarked on this journey.
As I've always said, the best laid plans of mice and men...
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