Note: This post is the fourth of a four-part series, and it includes Amazon links to different foods and food-related products that have helped me lose weight. Ordering from these links helps to support this page.

Two Larges, Too Large

“Yes, I’d like to order two large pizzas, please.”

It was Friday night, and I was leaving work with cell phone to ear. That meant it was time for a sacred and familiar weekend ritual that most American families will recognize.

The ordering of the pizzas.

On most Friday nights when I was morbidly obese, I ordered two large pizzas to go, and picked them up on my way home from work.

Two large pizzas is probably a normal amount of pizza for a family of four. The only problem with my order is that one pizza was for my wife and two children, and the other pizza was entirely for me.

And I normally ate most of my pizza in the car on my way home.

Eating entire large pizzas for dinner was a practice that I developed in college. I never experimented with drugs and alcohol in college, but once I realized that I could eat pizza whenever I wanted, I was like a kid who figured out how to start the engine of a tank.

Add to that the fact that you can get most large pizzas for less than $10, and I ate some truly awful things in the fifteen years between entering college and my diagnosis with diabetes.

The kind of pizza I usually got contained more than 3,000 total calories. And at nearly 300 total grams of carbs and sugars, I would have consumed fewer sugars if I had eaten 4 pints of chocolate ice cream.

I shudder to think of the effect that this gluttonous habit no doubt had on my blood sugar.

The Special Meal

Dinner is a special time for me. It’s the only meal that I regularly eat with my family every day. If I ever eat for a special occasion, it is usually at dinnertime. And on the extremely rare occasions that I have company over, it is usually for dinner.

I once used dinnertime as an excuse to indulge in a gluttonous splurge of Henritian proportions. But my attitude about dinner changed when I realized that I had to get my weight under control or face an early grave.

I’ve found that the key to eating a healthy dinner is the same as eating healthy at any other meal: balancing carbs, sugars, and proteins.

My golden mean for each meal is 45-60 combined grams of carbs and sugars per meal. And my secret weapon for achieving that at dinnertime is grilling.

Getting Up In Your Grill

I am relatively new to the world of grilling. I grew up watching my dad grill, but I didn’t own my own grill until I got married six years ago. My first was a charcoal grill.

I produced delicious food with the charcoal grill, and I love setting things on fire, but I quickly grew tired of having such little control over the temperature. It would sometimes take me more than an hour to get the fire going, and I am far too impatient for that.

So my second grill was a cheap propane rig. It was fantastic. Since that day, I have grilled constantly, and I grill exclusively with propane, just as Hank Hill would want.

On average, I grill something for dinner at least two or three nights a week. Rain or shine, freezing cold or burning hot, I grill in all conditions.

I have grilled when the temperature was in single digits. I have grilled during tornado warnings. I have grilled during flash floods. I have even grilled in the snow.

Grilling has been a way of life in the Alley house for several years. So when I began eating right, I already had experience in cooking meat that was both delicious and healthy.

I Have the Meats

When I first learned that I had diabetes, my doctor recommended that I eat sirloins. Compared to other cuts, sirloins are a relatively healthy, lean cut of meat. My wife prefers New York strips.

But for my money, it doesn’t get much better than a fresh ribeye. I pour a dab of low-sodium Dale’s on the steak, spread it evenly on both sides, then cook it for 8-10 minutes on each side in a closed grill that has been heated to about 500°.

I also grill a lot of boneless, skinless chicken breasts. I butterfly them, coat them with a splash of Dale’s, and cook them for about 10 minutes on each side. I have also grilled bison, lamb, and shark meat with varying degrees of success.

I’ll be honest; the shark meat was not that great.

The Sides

I eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast and lunch every day. But I try to never eat the same thing for dinner two nights in a row or more than twice in a week if I can help it.

That being said, probably the most common dinner for me consists of a grilled meat lightly marinated in low-sodium Dale’s sauce with a green-leaf lettuce salad and a baked sweet potato or sautéed sweet potato bites.

The salad is dressed with a small amount of honey mustard, a dab of shredded sharp cheddar cheese, three or four croutons, and flax seeds. The baked sweet potato has butter, cinnamon, salt and pepper.

The sautéed sweet potato bites are truly delicious. To make them, peel a sweet potato and cut it into cubes, then pan-cook the cubes in olive oil with dashes of cinnamon and parsley in a skillet. They taste great and have a subtle crunch reminiscent of hash browns. You can also cook unpeeled red potatoes in this manner by replacing the cinnamon with garlic powder and basil.

In the summer months, I also eat the occasional ear of fresh corn. Corn is high in carbohydrates, so I try to limit my corn intake to just once or twice a week.

The corn on the cob I eat is always grilled. I pull it from my garden, shuck it, rinse it, salt and pepper it, coat it with a drizzle of microwave-melted butter, and then wrap it in aluminum foil. Sometimes I also add cayenne pepper.

I leave the foiled cobs on the grill for the entire cooking time of whatever meat I’m cooking, rotating the cobs when I flip the meat. The result is mouth-watering.

Simply Nutritious

This simple dinner is easy to make, relatively inexpensive, and–together with portion control, impulse control, and daily exercise–has been one of the cornerstones of my weight loss.