Parenting Blog

More Than A Multivitamin, Smarty Pants Helps Shrink My ‘Food Clock’

This story is told in partnership with Smarty Pants Vitamins.

Jeff Bogle Smarty Pants Photo April 2018

In the end it will be known as the picture that saved my life. We were together on a press trip, on the Florida panhandle, offseason but still seasonably pleasant enough for time spent relaxing on the finely crushed quartz sand as the gulf water lapped up against the shore.

It was picturesque, until I got in the picture.

The sun was in all its glory and I was dozing off. Before my friend (and now podcast partner) Jason Greene went back to wash up for dinner, I asked him to capture me in a rare state of relaxation — a quick cellphone photo, something for the scrapbook.

It wasn’t his fault that I looked like a beached whale in that yellow and white striped chair, beneath a hunter green umbrella.

No, I’m not sharing the photo with you.

The following Monday, once back home, I made a change. This change. And I’m 60 pounds lighter for it…and still going.

What happened on that Monday morning, the one after Thanksgiving 2016, is that I woke up and decided on a whim to give up my two favorite foods: cold cereal and bread.

No more toasty o’s.

No more toasted bagels with cream cheese.

No more sugary flakes.

No more wheat toast with peanut butter.

No more of the breakfast foods I’d been eating since childhood, the foods that filled me up, however briefly, then left me craving more within an hour.

Instead, I woke up on that Monday to a big glass of water and a few Smarty Pants Adult Complete vitamins as I prepped school lunches, as I reminded my oldest daughter four times to brush her teeth, helped my youngest find her left sneaker, and carried the recycling to the curb when I went outside in the chill of late autumn to warm up the family car.

Three vitamins and water. That’s it.

The first three days without bread and cereal were brutal. No lie. I was hungry and hangry.

By that Wednesday night though, I sat in front of a tower of piping hot pizza boxes and plastic containers overflowing with triple chocolate cookies at one of my wife’s Big Brothers Big Sisters fundraising events, with no hankering at all to dig in.

In the nearly 18 months that have followed, those early AM Smarty Pants Vitamins along with a big ol’ glass of water have helped to shrink my eating clock by satisfying my morning hunger enough to get me to around 9:00, 9:30 or 10:00 AM before my body starts demanding something more grand. That’s when I fry up a couple of eggs, spoon out half an avocado, cut some grape tomatoes, and pour myself a cold glass of 100%-apple apple juice, or whip up a fluffy two-egg omelet with sautéed shrimp, low fat feta, asparagus and roasted red peppers. Yum and yum.

Between the mid-morning brunch I create for myself and a well balanced dinner, I snack on lightly salted peanuts, 100%-apple applesauce, slices of Swiss cheese, firm red grapes, crispy celery and garlic hummus, and I keep on drinking as much water as I can stand (which, to be fair, is a lot).

I’ll also stagger in another set of three Smarty Pants vitamins around 4 PM, after I’ve scooped up both kids from school.

The key to everything for me over the past year and a half are those tasty Smarty Pants Vitamins laid out on the kitchen counter, eaten over the course of 15-20 minutes, before I drive the kids to school and myself to the gym. By the time I’m back home, shower, check social media, and maybe write a few brilliant sentences, I’m ready to actually press start on my food clock. I eat less, crave less and feel incredible. No more beached whale.

I feel like a true smarty pants for discovering this novel way to use my daily vitamins to set up the rest of my day, every single day.

More than a multivitamin, indeed.

Smarty Pants Vitamins

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