The Hospital Diet...

Move over Dr. Atkins and Jenny Craig. If you've got a few pounds to lose, all you really need is a week or two in the hospital to shed those pesky pounds...

The "cuisine" available here at Hotel High Risk is perfect for weight loss. The meat is grey, the chicken is dry, the pasta sauce is crusty and the gravies are filmy. The swedish beatballs I tried to eat last night crunched. The bottoms of the whipped potato pile is cracked and dry, a la desert sand. The tomato soup is a bowl of water that has had a couple of tomatoes squeezed over it. I wouldn't testify to it in court, but the tuna....cat food. Even if you WANT to eat, you will find yourself hard-pressed to find anything edible. And being bed-ridden makes it all but impossible to go raid the fridge.

Meal times are also condusive to dropping the weight. 8am, 12noon and 5pm. At lunch, you're still full from breakfast (the only remotely palatable meal, so order one of everything and eat up!), and at 5pm, you're still sick to your stomach from whatever lunch you tried to eat. It makes life pretty unpleasant around 8-9pm, when you're actually experiencing hunger for the first time in the day, but that's what Girl Scout cookies are for.

Let me tell you about breakfast. We are usually so hungry when we wake up that I would probably chew on a pair of socks if I thought it would provide any nutrional value to the little man. That blinding hunger MAY have something to do with my current love affair with hospital breakfast. A typical breakfast for me these days consists of a cup of cereal, either belgan waffles or cinnamon swirl french toast, a vat of syrup, and whatever meat product they're peddling that day (except the canadian bacon--too salty), a bagel with cream cheese or a muffin, orange juice and the fruit of the day.

This is a ton of food and for the first week, I just picked a couple of the items from the menu, not wanting to seem like a big old pig of a pregnant lady. Now, I realize it is the only meal I will be able to enjoy, so when breakfast comes now, the lady is desperately trying to balance the tray, piled high with ALL of it.

In spite of the breakfast binges and the Girl Scout cookie snacks, I have managed to shed 4-5 of my pregnancy pounds in the past two weeks. Actually I shed them in the first week and maintained the loss the second week. Shocking. Husband assures me I am in no danger of wasting away (because boys say some really dumb things sometimes), and I guess that is reassuring in a way that it wouldn't be were I not growing the other human being and all...

So as I sit and wait for the magic wheel chair to arrive and wisk me to the ultrasound that will decide my immediate fate, I am taking comfort in the fact that if I am indeed sprung today or tomorrow from Hotel High Risk, I am leaving with the luxury of 5 fewer pounds to lose once the little man has joined us in the outside world.

That makes up for the crunchy meatballs.