The BBQ Meatloaf and Bavarian Cream Puff Diet

It sounds bizarre, I know. In fact, it makes no sense at all. A classic example of mystical new age mumbo jumbo. The stuff of Internet exaggeration and word of mouth gone wild. Surely there’s not a single shred of truth to it.

Well . . . that’s what I thought, too. But the thing is, The BBQ Meatloaf and Bavarian Cream Puff Diet has changed my life. And it can change your life, too. Let me explain.

Seven months ago my world was in a shambles. I woke up one morning, looked in the mirror, and what I saw filled me with shame and hopelessness. That bright young man who once burned with such passion and promise had been replaced by a middle-aged zombie with a gut big enough to house Reese Witherspoon.

It would be a long road back, but I was convinced that my path to redemption had to begin with reclaiming my body. I started with the well-known diets that had produced big headlines and small waistlines. I tried them all – Atkins, The Zone, Jenny Craig, The South Beach Diet. In every case, my results were less then dramatic. So I kept searching, venturing deeper and deeper into more obscure dietary terrain.

I tried the Henry Winkler Grilled Cheese and Tomato Diet, but the melted cheese didn’t melt away the pounds. I tried Connie Chung’s “Fish Kabob Your Way to a Fabulous Body,” but couldn’t keep up the kabobing.

 I ate free-range Cornish game hens raised in Santo Domino by Benedictine monks. For awhile, I lived on potato pancakes handmade by a German farmer’s wife and shipped FedEx from Frankfort. I tried eating three big meals a day, then six small ones, then, as a last resort, just one large raisin a day topped with Cool Whip. Nothing seemed to click for me, until the improbable happened.

I was standing in the magazine section at Barnes & Noble flipping through the quarterly issue of a lesser known medical journal when I saw it. There, on page 83, was a report on the results of a five-year study conducted by nutrition researchers at the Crabtree University of Medicine in Shawshank, New York. Their findings were at once shocking and inspiring.

 A group of 217 chronically overweight heart patients who were fed nothing but BBQ meatloaf and Bavarian cream puffs from June of 2007 to April of 2012 had reached and maintained their target weights. What’s more, all 217 had overcome every trace of coronary heart disease and diabetes and were living lives of optimum health and well-being. Three had even won Pulitzer Prizes and two had become Supreme Court Judges, though none of them had any formal education beyond high school.

What, I wondered, could account for such an extraordinary resurgence of body, mind and spirit in people who had once been so desperate that they agreed to be guinea pigs in such a controversial experiment?

 These words from lead researcher Dr. Lamont Meredith put it all in sharp focus:

“The fats found in BBQ meatloaf are considered essential fats, because our body cannot manufacture them. BBQ fats in particular are used by the body to create “signaling molecules” that when balanced with the meatloaf as a protein source and the sugar in the cream puffs as a quick source of energy, work to stabilize insulin production, accelerate the metabolism, and safely burn body fat at record rates.”

 For me, it worked miracles. After only four months on The BBQ Meatloaf and Bavarian Cream Puff Diet, I’ve dropped 30 pounds, taken up kayaking, learned to play the Didgeridoo, built my own hot tub, and made the cover of Zesty Guy Magazine. Twice.

Can a diet consisting of BBQ meatloaf and Bavarian cream puffs really change someone’s life for the better you ask? I’m here to tell you: It changed mine. So get that sour taste of defeat out of your mouth and say “yes” to a yummy new way of life. 

Fueled by BBQ meatloaf and Bavarian cream puffs, you’re sure to find health, happiness and a world of exciting possibilities ahead. Maybe even a seat on the Supreme Court.

I guarantee you, no one on the Connie Chung Fish Kabob diet ever made it that far.

The Stoning

The human body is a mysterious thing. One minute it can be lying comfortably in bed without a care in the world. The next, it can be mimicking the feeling of a knife in the back, causing its owner to stagger into a bathroom, clutch a towel rack like a boxer on the ropes, and debate whether to die quietly or cry out to others.

But what exactly should I yell?

“I’ve been stabbed – please come quickly!” (That wasn’t really accurate, and the request for assistance felt halfhearted.)

“Someone help me – it’s an emergency!” (Using the universal someone allows everyone to tune out, and one man’s true emergency is another man’s search for toilet paper.)

“Help – I’m in pain!” (This is a plea that lacks context, inviting a range of off-target responses from “Can I get you some antacids?” to “Here’s my therapist’s card – she’s easy to talk to and very affordable.”)

By the time I finished debating what to yell the pain had subsided. So I took some aspirin, continued on with my morning, and chalked it all up to a strained back muscle.

Bad diagnosis, Dr. Alan.  

On average each year, kidney stones are responsible for more than 600,000 emergency rooms visits in the U.S. Two nights after my mysterious back pain first surfaced, I became part of that stone cold stat.

“You have a 7 millimeter kidney stone in your right ureter,” the ER doctor confirmed.

“Is that considered big?” I asked, not sure if I should picture a poppy seed or pop corn.

“Anything below 5 millimeters usually passes on its own,” he explained. “Above 5 millimeters and it’s less predictable.”

He had that right. After those first few hours in the ER, I was hospitalized for three days; put on IV fluids, morphine and nausea meds; released from the hospital with new pain meds; given home care instructions to flush the stone out naturally; and endured four days of excruciating discomfort and nausea as the pain would ramp up before the next doses of meds could be taken. And still, the stone loitered stubbornly in my ureter making my life a living hell.

Finally, a week after my trip to the emergency room, my urologist scheduled me to undergo shockwave lithotripsy, a procedure where you’re hooked up to a machine that generates high intensity sound waves to shatter the stone into smaller pieces inside your urinary tract. Sound like fun? Not unless you consider your body a video game battleground where the one who bags the biggest rock collection wins.

“How’d it go?” I asked back in the foggy ambiance of the recovery area. “Did the shockwaves work?”

“The stone wouldn’t shatter that way, but I nailed it,” the urologist reported with the cocky air of a video game scoring champ.

“You used a nail?” I probed uncomprehendingly, still dopey from the anesthesia.

“I put in a catheter and attacked it arthroscopically,” he clarified.  “After I pushed it back into your kidney, it fragmented into a pile of powder and gravel.”

“Clutch move,” I murmured. “Sorry I slept through it.”  

My post-procedure homework assignment was to carefully strain my urine for a week so I could bring in my game-winning gravel for analysis. I don’t mean to brag, but after handing over a sample for the lab tests I had enough left over to start my own line of kidney stone jewelry and collectibles.

The brochure the doctor gives you says that once you’ve had one kidney stone there’s about a 60 to 70% chance you’ll have another. The good news is that you can greatly lower the odds of recurrence by taking certain preventative steps. Having been through one stoning and lived to tell about it, I’m in.

Reduce animal proteins? Done deal.

Cut down on sodium? No sweat.

Watch my oxalate intake? A-okay.    

Drink enough water each day to fill the killer whale tank at Miami Seaquarium? Gulp ... I’m working on it.

Hey, if it will dilute my urine enough to keep crystals from gradually building into a rock-like mass that can send me back to kidney stone purgatory, I’m all for it.

Which reminds me. I need to find a bathroom. Wait, who am I kidding? With this kind of fluid intake, I need to find every bathroom.