Vancouver Courier

- By Sandra Thomas-Staff writer

Cost of meal delivery service: $40 per day.

Hearing people ask "Have you lost weight?": priceless.

I knew I was in "The zone" when I hosted a party six nights after starting the diet and left the chips and bruschetta to my guests without so much as a sideways glance.

It wasn't quite that easy days earlier, as I made my way through an agonizingly carbohydrate-free week compliments of a local meal-delivery service that specializes in The Zone diet. About day three, I could feel my cranky-meter rise as my craving for pizza, pasta and anything potatoes peaked.

But I was determined to stick it out for the full seven days, and sure enough, my cravings subsided near the end of the week. That reaction is typical of almost everyone who goes on the high protein, low-carb regime, says Nigel Malkin, the brainchild behind The Specialty Gourmet, a company that delivers Zone-friendly meals and snacks to busy professionals.

"Your body is missing carbs and it takes a while to adjust," he said. "But you will, and those cravings will disappear."

With the help of the meal-delivery service, the diet is easy to stick to, based on convenience alone. Each morning before 6 a.m., a blue cooler was dropped outside my front door packed with three meals and two snacks. Looking like part of an illegal organ transplant scheme, I left the empty cooler out each night and retrieved a full one in the morning.

Malkin came up with the idea of the delivery service last year after he went on the diet himself and lost 30 pounds. His busy schedule as a building manager in the film industry doesn't allow much time for cooking, so he searched out someone to do it for him. "But no one was offering the service," Malkin said. "Things were kind of slow in the film business here and I didn't know if they were going to pick up again, so I figured I could pay my taxes or start a business. The film industry is turning around but I decided to start a business anyway."

Malkin approached several caterers and finally decided on Kits-based Lazy Gourmet to prepare the meals and snacks. He said at first the food was fairly standard, but as the chefs became familiar with the dos and don'ts of the diet, they began to experiment and create new dishes.

The service's clientele largely consists of single, harried professionals who normally eat out two or three times a day already, Malkin said. The full meal deal, including breakfast, lunch, dinner and two snacks costs $39.95 per day; a package including breakfast, lunch and one snack costs $27.95; and lunch, dinner and a snack is $29.95.

"It's expensive to eat out all the time, plus they're confronted with choices," he said. "With this service, they don't even have to think about it."

Only about 60 per cent of clients enlist the service to lose weight-the other 40 per cent are simply concerned with eating a healthier diet. While he wouldn't reveal how many people have signed up, he says his client list is growing by 20 to 30 per cent each month.

A typical day on the service might include praline pancakes with ham and maple syrup for breakfast, spiced pepper steak for lunch and Southwestern chicken with pepper and bean salsa. Vegetarian options are available daily, and meal portions can be raised or lowered at no extra cost.

Overall, I found the food good, but clients need to be specific about likes and dislikes. I'm not a huge tofu fan, although I don't mind it in stir fries, so I left it in as a menu choice. When one lunch consisted of two large portions of grilled tofu on vegetables, however, I donated it to the Courier's resident vegetarian and went out and bought a green salad. The end result was a four-pound weight loss in one week, a new pair of jeans one size smaller and a new outlook on food choices.

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