Day 3

Much of the reason I chose the Jenny Craig diet was because of my job. It isn’t what you would call conducive to dieting. I work as a community based therapist, which basically means I drive around to different parts of town all day long and am never in one place more than one hour. Needless to say I don’t have a lot of time to think about eating and usually make the worst (and most fattening) choices on the run. I figured with JC, all my meals would be packaged and ready to go. While this absolutely makes meal planning and preparing a thing of the past, it presented a new problem: storage.

Many of the JC breakfast, lunch and dinner items are frozen or need some heating up. Of course, I am usually in my car so this has thrown a wrench into my perfect diet fantasy. Over the last few work days I have either had to heat all my meals in advance and carry them with me or… well… just eat them cold. Neither option has been appealing. Now that I think about it, some of the other low carb or low fat diets might have suited my lifestyle better because they are not based on prepackaged foods. But I have committed to JC and will find a way to stick with it until I reach my goal weight.

Back to food storage. I can see how yogurt and granola can be kept in a cooler but heating pancakes and sausage and eating them four hours later does not sound so great. But let me tell you, when you are hungry and have been driving for hours your tolerance for ill-prepared food increases. Suddenly, eating a lukewarm enchilada platter doesn’t seem so offensive. But when I told my close friend about eating a cold sweet and sour chicken entrée, she grimaced and admitted nothing could drive her to that. She has deeply held food preparation beliefs. So, as the past few days have revealed, this storage problem is an issue that must be resolved. Either I need to figure out how to carry a microwave in my car or change jobs. Frustration, thy name is Jenny Craig!