Unemployment Chronicles, Day 69: Low-Iodine Diet

Otherwise known as the no-fun diet, the no-salt diet, the I'm-always-hungry diet, and the I-can't-believe-how-much-weight-I'm-losing diet.

It actually doesn't have to be no-salt, but you can't use iodized salt or sea salt.  Rather than buy non-iodized salt, or try to figure out if processed foods have iodine in them, I just avoid salt.  (I did this before twice.)

The reason for the diet is to starve my body for iodine, so that when they give me a radioactive (small dose) iodine pill, my body sucks up the iodine.  Then they scan with a machine that picks up the radiation.

Here is what you can't have on the no-fun diet, at least as I practice it:

• Salt
• Grain products
• Eggs
• Dairy
• Fish or anything from the sea
• Restaurant food
• Potato skins
• Most beans, particularly soybean products
• You can have meat or chicken, but just a few ounces, without salt
• Rhubarb or maraschino cherries
• Chocolate (!)

Actually, I don't mind giving up rhubarb for a couple of weeks.  Here is what I do eat:

• Coke with sugar.  I need calories on this diet.
• Potatoes without the skins, with oil and no-salt seasoning
• One chicken thigh per day
• Fruit
• Vegetables, including salad with oil and vinegar.  Not a salad dressing, just oil and vinegar.
• Unflavored oatmeal.  A welcome exception to avoiding grains, because the unflavored stuff only contains oats.
• Unsalted nuts or peanut butter

Today I have had four Cokes (need to stop that), oatmeal with raisins twice, apple juice with strawberries and bananas blended in, an avocado and some tomatoes with oil and vinegar, my one piece of chicken, watermelon, and some natural and unsalted peanut butter.  Everything but the chicken feels so insubstantial that I want to eat again soon after I eat, but the choices keep me from eating very much, so I stay hungry.

Last time I did this, I lost 15 pounds in three weeks.  Some things that taste OK the first day get to be distasteful after a couple of weeks, so it gets harder as time goes on.

Observations so far:

• Chicken tastes great almost no matter what.  I love chicken.
• "Natural" peanut butter pretty much glues your mouth shut.
• Before I had the chicken, oatmeal with blackberry jam and raisins was the high point of my culinary day.  It's easy to fix and tastes fine.  I wonder if I wll still think that in two weeks.
• Oil and vinegar tastes like vinegar.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.

One more thing.  I have to follow this diet while I'm travelling to Boston for four days.  That should be a challenge.