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How I Lost 60 Pounds On Weird Stouffers Lasagna Diet
August 1, 2008
I’ve had several ups and downs with weight throughout my life, mostly due to poor food choices when I was little and spending summers on my grandparents farm where the ice cream and mashed potatoes & gravy flowed like alcohol at a frat party.
I came from a family with little money, and when I wasn’t eating better quality stuff from the farm, most of the time we could only afford what I now call “poor people food” - which is the crappy, high-calorie, low-nutrition stuff nobody else wants. It’s the kind of stuff Aldi’s sells… or some of the REALLY cheap crap you could find at Wal-Mart… or no-name private label brands independent grocery stores used to carry.
Those very few years of bad eating created excess blubber that followed me around for years afterward; all the way up until 8th and 9th grade in school, where I finally buckled down and went from 240 pounds all the way down to an all-time low of 162 or so.
I kept it off for a long time, but eventually some of it started to come back. A few years after high school, I was back up to around 230 pounds. The worst part was I didn’t even realize it when it was happening… it all just sortof snuck up on me slowly and without warning. Then one day you just wake up and wonder how you gained it all back.
But right now, as I write this, I am thinner, more muscular, fit, trim, and in better overall health than I’ve ever been in my entire life. And with each passing week, I continue to get better and more improved.
How do I do it? Does it involve back-breaking hours in the gym, coked up on a daily diet of power bars, super-smoothies, and radioactive crystal energy rods?
No.
How about a strict daily intake of veggie salad with a side of diet seaweed?
Never.
Actually, I discovered the solution to my weight problem completely by accident. It’s a little weird, and requires some discipline… but it works wonders quickly and without too much effort.
Here’s the story:
Shortly after my mom got married, her new husband’s father died, and both of them flew off out west to Washington and California to tend to what they THOUGHT were some simple funeral arrangements and matters of estate.
But it wasn’t long before “simple” became ultra-complicated, as my mom and her husband navigated the tricky unwinding labrynth of his father’s estate, lack of a will, untold lawyer problems, and brutal real estate market.
This left their house back home in Missouri utterly vacant, and in need of a trustworthy house-sitter.
Enter yours truly.
What started out as a simple few months of house-sitting actually became nearly 2 years of me watching over things and running affairs back at home.
During these 2 years, I had to make do on VERY little money, yet eat healthy and make progress on my own life at the same time.
So I went to the local grocery stores, and spent some time… SOME REALLY SERIOUS TIME… studying everything offered on the shelves, their costs, their nutritional values, calories, fat, fiber… everything.
Then I went home and compared my lists, trying to create what to me would be the MOST IDEAL MEAL POSSIBLE… which at that time meant these five things:
1. Extremely inexpensive. (I wanted to get my cost-per-meal (CPM) to somewhere between one and two dollars at the most)
2. Low-calorie.
3. Makes me feel full when I’m done eating and stays with me throughout the day.
4. Healthy, with the proper fiber, fat content, and nutrients.
5. Tasted good. Wasn’t something I had to “stomach” down… it had to be something I could eat with pleasure.
6. Wasn’t hard, or time-consuming to fix… because I have far better things to be doing with my time than sweating it out in a hot kitchen, day after day, week after week.
Oddly enough, what I discovered wasn’t some hippie-induced orgy of lettuce and vegetables… No, what I discovered was the magic of what I now call “Greg Thompson’s Stouffers Lasagna Diet.”
Here’s how it works:
Step #1. Stock your freezer with the largest trays of Stouffers Lasagna you can possibly find. Mine shown below are the huge 96 oz (6 pound!) trays sold at Sam’s Club for around $9.60 - now THAT’S cheap! On my plan, the lasagna is the best way I found to provide the necessary fat, carbs, protein, and calories you need to keep on living, without giving you TOO much of ‘em. Plus, it tastes quite good… and since the other stuff in my plan doesn’t taste like much, this lasagna will feel like heaven hitting your tongue after a couple weeks.
Step #2. Stock your pantry with the largest quantities of corn and green beans as you can find in one place. I prefer the 6 pound cans of Del Monte sweet corn and Del Monte green beans. They’re the good stuff without the additives - and cost about $2.60 and $3.50 each. Ultra cheap. The green beans are a healthy weight loss tool in and of themselves, and they make a great ultra-low-calorie filler for the whole meal. And the corn is a pretty sweet way to get your fiber.
Step #3. Unpack one of the Stouffers Lasagnas from the freezer and pop it into the oven @ 400 degrees F - and leave it there for the next 2 hours. After the 2 hours are up, take the foil cover off the top and leave it in there for another 10 minutes.
Step #4. After the last 10 minutes are up, turn off the heat and remove the pan from the oven. I usually let mine cool as it rests on the unused stove burners, so I don’t risk burning my countertop or something else I’d like to keep looking nice.
Step #5. Cut the lasagna up into EIGHT (8) equal pieces. This is very important, because 8 pieces out of a 96 oz lasagna gives you just enough of a portion each meal to fill you up and provide necessary calories and fat, but not so much that it’s TOO much. This size is juuuuust right!
Step #6. Now scoop out some green beans and corn - enough to fill in the gaps in your plate. For what it’s worth, I’ve also found that Popeye’s spinach or southern style turnip greens will work well as extras if you need something more than just the green beans and corn. However, a warning: don’t mess with this recipe by adding or removing foods… believe me, I’ve tried just about everything and have found ONLY THIS EXACT COMBINATION of stuff to produce the incredibly effective weight loss results. Every time I tried to “mess with the system” I got burned and my weight either gained or stagnated. I’ll say it again: if you’re going to do this, DON’T MESS WITH THE SYSTEM 
Just let it work for you, and the weight will begin to melt off.
Eat this 2 times per day; one meal right after you get up in the morning, and another meal a few hours before you go to bed. Eventually, your body will train itself to only be hungry at these times and the food you get with each meal with fill you up until the next.
Supplement the meal with a nice cold glass of green tea, like I have in the picture below, and occasionally alternate it with some milk. (It must be WHOLE MILK, and the good kind that doesn’t have all that antibiotic crap in it… Pet brand from Sam’s Club fills this requirement just fine.) Personally, I drink the milk with the morning meal and the green tea with the evening meal. Also, I take a multi-vitamin with my morning meal and more recently, some Sun Chlorella, which seems to work wonders for my focus and energy.
I realize that might look like a helluva lotta corn, but don’t worry; it only looks like that because my plate is so big. Like I said before, for more variety, I’ve found you can add Popeye’s spinach or turnip greens to the mix without affecting the weight loss properties of the diet.
Now supplement this diet with some small 5 to 10 minute sets of push-ups, situps, and oblique twists while you watch TV every time, and you’ll notice dramatic results very soon!
For me, it all happened my accident; in my efforts to find the perfect low-maintainence meal, I noticed I started to shed a few pounds, so I kept it up. After a couple more weeks, even more was lost. So I just kept going and going and going… the weight drop seemed to NEVER end, until fnally I reached my first plateau after going from 230 to about 185 or so.
Breaking through the 185 barrier required me to do more exercise and activity, and eventually I dropped down to a low of 170, where I am right at this very moment.
Will I reach my all-time low? Will I surpass it? Yes, and yes.
Strangely, I can now wear a much smaller pants size at 170 than I could in 9th grade at 162. I don’t really understand that, but oh well.
Anyway, this particular method has served me VERY well and continues to do so to this day. It might be the thing that begins to turn your life around too.
Go on, give it a shot. All you have to lose is a couple weeks and about $20 bucks of your money. Hell, you’d spend more than that on the next crazy diet book at the store…
…and you can’t even eat a diet book.
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Tags: del monte, diet, exercise, fitness, food, green beans, Health, lasagna diet, losing weight, popeyes spinach, stouffers, stouffers lasagna, sweet corn, turnip greens, weight lossTopics: Health |