Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 62095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 62095 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 310(@200wpm)___ 248(@250wpm)___ 207(@300wpm)
For all I knew, Ethan was doing the same thing. He knew my last name. He must know Gray’s last name too. Or maybe he hadn’t made the connection. I didn’t know. I was riddled with doubt all of a sudden, but my mind was still made up. I wanted to see this through.
A tap on the window made me jump in my seat, and I spotted Ethan outside wearing a QFC tee and a curious smile.
Shit. Okay, let’s do this.
I unbuckled my seat belt and opened the door.
“Good morning,” he said. “I’ll admit that’s not the car I thought you would drive.”
What was wrong with my car? It was my baby. A ’92 Jeep Wrangler, teal-colored, which was my favorite.
“What car did you think I would drive, then?” I asked.
He shrugged and glanced around the parking lot. It was slowly filling with the early shoppers.
“A Prius?” he guessed.
A Prius?!
Oh, my daddy would roll over in his grave.
I scrunched my nose and pretended to survey the parking lot too. “So where’s your red Porsche?”
“Ouch,” he laughed. “Well played.”
I thought so too.
On our way into the store, Ethan grabbed a cart and said I’d be in charge. He was here as my safety net, sounding board, and advice machine. His words. And I was buying food for one week, no more.
“Do you enjoy cooking?” he asked.
“I love it.” We arrived at the in-store bakery and bread section first, and I suppressed a sigh at the sight of white bread. “So this carb cycling you want me to try…I assume it’s not any type of carbs.”
“For the most part,” he confirmed. He stopped at a display with freshly baked loaves. “The simple trick about foods you shouldn’t eat often is not to have it at home. White bread is for when you meet up with a friend at a coffee shop or a weekend brunch with your family—cake is for birthdays, and so on. I will never tell you to cut out anything altogether. We’ve eaten sugar and white bread for generations, and everything has its advantages in small amounts. Sometimes very small.” He smirked faintly and held up a loaf of whole grain bread with sunflower seeds and carrots. “Let’s talk breakfast. What do you usually eat?”
“Um, I wanna circle back to family brunch first,” I said. “I’m not trying to find loopholes or anything, just get a good idea of those small amounts. I’m fairly social, so I’d probably get nowhere if I indulged in white bread every time I met up with a friend.”
“Good point,” he replied with a nod. “Okay, so here’s the standard mind-set you wanna incorporate. One, always see if there’s a healthier option on the menu. Two, you can’t hate it. If you hate the food you eat, you’ll fall off the wagon. Three, before your new lifestyle has become more of a habit, maybe restrict the intake of white bread to once a week. How’s that?”
Once a week was more generous than all the diets that forbade it completely. I struggled with those a lot, not just because I loved white bread but because life didn’t work that way. I had business dinners, events, and work travels. Healthy food wasn’t always available.
“That sounds good.”
I didn’t think I’d ever spent a full hour in a grocery store before, but time flew by surprisingly fast. Ethan was the advice machine he’d promised, and for every item we added to my cart, I gained a bit more understanding and clarity about how the rest of my everyday life was going to look.
I had the healthier fats, like olive oil, avocados, walnuts, olives, and fatty fish. The healthier carbs, like whole grain bread packed with seeds and whatnot, a few kinds of rice, including white, and a single serving of baby potatoes.
I had an epic amount of beans and lentils too.
Throughout the hour, Ethan texted me recipes I could use for inspiration, and he talked about the importance of never starving oneself, always making sure the body got all the nutrients it needed.
Most of this stuff, I’d heard before in various contexts with different diets, but I liked having it all put together for what Ethan was doing for me. He signed me up to QFC’s automatic text service too, where I would receive occasional reminders, usually one or two texts a day, with prompts to drink more water and get up and move around.
When we were done and left the store together, my mind was swimming with unwritten lists, options for healthy snacks, terms that were new for me, like metabolic confusion. Basically, I needed to have a lot of variety, and I would alternate between days with more carbs and days with no carbs at all.
I was ready to give it a go.
After helping me load the groceries into my car, Ethan went to return the cart.