Bran Muffin Diet

Related Comic: The Muffin Man

The Diet:

Eat bran muffins (as many as you want) and drink water. Nothing more.

I used a "low calorie" recipe I got off the internet for my muffins.

• 1 cup of bran
• 1 cup of skim milk
• 1 cup of wheat flour
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup of oil
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• 1/2 tsp of salt
• 2 1/2 tsp of baking soda

Optional ingredients included raisins and walnuts.

I substituted no sugar added apple sauce in place of oil. I also put in less and less sugar each time I made the recipe (eventually only using 1/8 cup of sugar in my final batch).

Initially I used bran cereal, but I eventually moved from that to just unprocessed oat bran.

The Experience:

Monday was Halloween, and I ate a bunch of candy and some fruit during the day, it wasn't until the evening that I started baking muffins. When I weighed myself Monday evening I was 2 pounds up from Sunday morning (6 pounds up in 8 days). That sure motivated me to be very strict on the diet, maybe too strict.

Lets take a look at a few entries from my dairy this week:

• Monday - Muffins are delicious I could eat them endlessly!
• Tuesday - Muffins are still pretty good, but I'm hungry.
• Wednesday - Getting pretty bland here, maybe walnuts and raisins will liven things up. My stomach hurts from hunger when I don't eat, and hurts from the muffins when I do. Could the muffins be playing tricks on me?
• Thursday - If I couldn't see the walnuts and raisins I wouldn't believe they were there, there is no flavor to speak of. Sometimes I see the muffins huddled together saying things to each other, plotting.
• Friday - I have haunting nightmares of the Muffin Man chasing me into a corner from which I cannot escape. I wake up in cold sweats, only to find the muffins watching me.
• Saturday - Dabadabadabadabadabadabadaba... (The rest is lost because there was a large volume of drool on the page which obscured the text).

Thursday night I went a friend's pre-wedding party at a restaurant. I had only had eight muffins during the day, and had just come from Aikido, so I was extremely hungry. Knowing that I was teaching my class in the morning, I decided I should get something to energize me (for some reason they had no bran muffins at this so called "restaurant"). I had some corn chips with salsa and a garden salad. The salad turned out to be enormous, and I ate a good portion of it. Eating these other foods must have angered the muffins still in my body, because I was up half the night sick to my stomach.

Saturday for my final batch of muffins I threw in a couple of bananas. While the muffins smell like banana, they taste exactly like all the other muffins before them. Bland, and unenjoyable. Of course, it is true that I put in progressively less sugar in every batch, but I also added other sweet things (apple sauce, raisins, and ultimately bananas). The power of bran is too strong.

The Result:

Despite a holiday, I was able to lose everything I had gained from the previous week + Halloween. So 4 pounds down from the previous Sunday. I'm still floating around where I've been for months now, I can't seem to get any lower.

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