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Welcome back to The Diet Oracle! We are on Day Three of our week-long venture into The Mediterranean Diet Weight Loss Solution and thus far, it has been a mixed bag, my friends. Day One offered up some great recipes that were both tasty and satisfying. Day Two? Well, Day Two had some trouble in the flavor department. However! Day Three is a new day and steak is on the menu! So let’s get right to the food log and see how it all went.

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Day Three’s Meal Plan

Breakfast

• Carrot and Bran Muffin (pg. 93)
• 1 egg
• Grapes
• Coffee with half and half

Lunch

• Tuna Salad Sandwich on whole wheat bread (pg. 66)
• 1/2 sliced pear

Snack

• 1 ounce mozzarella
• 10 cherry tomatoes

Dinner

• Steak with Red Wine-Mushroom Sauce (pg. 176)
• Greek Salad (pg. 110)
• Baked Apple with Walnuts and Spices (pg. 197)

My Thoughts

Day Three went pretty well, I’d say. Breakfast was relatively quick and easy, as was lunch. Nice to not have a sinkful of dishes to contend with! Breakfast today made use of the Carrot and Bran Muffins I made earlier in the week, so it was a no muss, no fuss start to the day. Lunch came together in a snap, too. I enjoyed Stassou’s simple but tasty recipe for tuna salad and certainly felt satisfied with my lunch.

The highlight for the day was definitely dinner. If you appreciate a good steak and enjoy mushrooms, you will love this recipe for Steak with Red Wine-Mushroom Sauce. The sautéed mushrooms were really delicious with the fresh thyme and added loads of flavor to the red wine reduction sauce. I did miss not having a little butter whisked in at the end of deglazing, but such is life when you’re on a diet, no?

Though I enjoyed my steak sans starch, I roasted up some little baby potatoes for rest of the crew lest they starve. If you were needing a few more calories on your plate, these would be a quick and easy addition with virtually no clean up. Though they hardly warrant a recipe, I’ll be sure post one soon for those nights you need a potato side that’s both healthy and delicious!

The Breakdown

So let’s crunch some numbers for the day! Across the 3 meals and 1 snack, calories came in at 1318 with 34% of calories from carbohydrate, 43% from fat, and 23% from protein. Only 14 grams of fiber today. Once again, calories are coming in right around 1300 calories per day and a quick weigh-in this morning showed I was down half a pound.

From personal experience, I know that this calorie level will typically deliver some results over the course of a week and so I adjusted Stassou’s plan down from 1500 calories accordingly. As Stassou mentions, a person can certainly modify her plan to suit their own needs by adjusting the number of snacks, adding protein to any vegetarian meals/snacks, or by decreasing/increasing portion sizes a bit. In my case, I simply stick to 1 snack per day (as opposed to 2-3 snacks) and call it good.

Keeping Hunger at Bay

Though 1300 calories isn’t much, Stassou really does make every single bite count. I have yet to be bothered with any serious hunger pangs and have enjoyed the color, flavor, and variety of her recipes (mostly). I find that for most people, feeling hungry is perhaps the number one reason they quit on any given diet. After all, it is pretty hard to ignore biology. Once you let yourself truly get physically hungry, it is near impossible to think about anything besides FOOD. Food like brownies. Chips. Inordinate amounts of pasta. You get the idea. Stassou has really done a great job of creating a menu that manages to cut calories without undue misery.

And that’s it for Day Three! Tomorrow we’ll be to our half-way point in this little Mediterranean experiment and speaking of experiments, I’ll be trying out Stassou’s recipe for French Toast! The ingredient list looks a little iffy, so we’ll see what happens!

Thanks for reading! If you’d like to learn more about the Mediterranean diet, you do so here.