By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

I have been married to Hal for almost sixteen years, and I have been trying to get him to eat right for fifteen and a half of them. While I love my husband, we have had an ongoing battle about why the 200 calories in a pretzel are not equal to the 200 calories in an avocado.

This is why I was shocked when he told me he had signed up for a prepared diet food delivery system. I never asked to stop serving as his unofficial nutritional guru. In fact, I kind of liked it.

Was this service going to laugh about his joke about liking a little tea with his sugar?

Would they pack him a Tupperware container lunch with a piece of fresh salmon and broccoli? I doubt it.

Next I imagined he’d be getting into bed with Jenny Craig who, incidentally, now refers to herself as Jenny in all lowercase letters. Enough with the familiarity. I didn’t want her in my bedroom, to say nothing of my kitchen.

This wasn’t Hal’s first go at a nutritional remake. Since 2003, we have gone through the Moosewood Cookbook phase, the private chef shared with our neighbors’ period, and the infamous plastic bag diet, which was both environmentally unsound and nutritionally unsatisfying. It involved my putting small quantities of nuts or cheese or raisins into tiny packages and telling Hal that was all he could eat between meals.

A week ago, the giant box of food arrived, and Hal was really excited. Usually when the door opens and there’s a package behind it, it’s got my name and Nordstrom’s on it. He ripped into the box, conveniently ignoring the one plastic envelope that said, “Open Me First.” Clearly this was shaping up to be a rousing success.

By the time he was done, all the packages of chemically modified meals were hopelessly mixed up. He decided it didn’t matter. If he could just eat five things in the packages every day, he told me, the weight would come off.

Initially I was not a supportive spouse. I had met the enemy, and it was packaged chili with beans.

“The one thing all the nutritionists say is that you should eat fresh, not out of packages,” I told Hal. Did I really say that out loud? Yeah, I did.

In a shining example of untruth in advertising, the first week of the program was called Fresh Start. Really? It might have been a start. But how could anything that came through the mail encased in plastic claim to be fresh? I consoled myself. At least I was spending less at the supermarket.

It all came to a halt last night when Hal faced Week Two.

“What do I do about the special shakes? I’m not sure where they fit in,” Hal said. It occurred to me that Hal was becoming unduly attached to these drinks which weren’t part of any discernible food group.

That was the dawn of the Evening of Befuddlement, wherein two grownups with masters’ degrees couldn’t figure out the nuances of the food system vocabulary. We even waited 20 minutes to get a weight counselor on the phone who kept admonishing us to read the tiny little book. I didn’t want to read the tiny little book unless it was a page turner by Lianne Moriarity or Harlan Coben.

No such luck. The book had the scintillating title of Daily Tracker and Grocery Guide.

The thing was incomprehensible. There were addition signs around words like PowerFuels and SmartCarbs. Then there were the puzzling FlexMeals; Hal was allotted six a week.

A Flex Meal was a real (very small) meal, and Hal could add one diet food packet to whatever he chose to eat. This could be actual fiber or protein. Oh, excuse me; I mean PowerFuel, as in one egg, a piece of turkey bacon or a slice of cheese. In other words, real food. But at first, only occasionally. All Flex meant was that the ubiquitous packets continued to star in the new eating “program”. What a shocker.

As we paged through the book, something struck me when we got to the infamous Grocery Guide.

“This is just a printed list of the things I buy every week at the store,” I said.

For fifteen years I have been going about it all wrong. I should have marketed myself, given my food packages for Hal fancy one-word names like CarrotCarton or BroccoliBox.

But for now, I will be his packaged diet food cheerleader. When he can’t find his glasses, I will read him the insanely small print on the packages, so he knows precisely how long to put them in the microwave.

If this food plan turns eating into an exercise in cutting through plastic, so be it. But there’s no one for me to eat with now because Hal’s not really eating. He stands at the counter, and he’s done in less time than it takes to microwave his dinner. I admire his discipline. But I suspect good conversation around the table may be better for his health.

I can’t be too angry at the program. The proof is in the results. After one week Hal is down six pounds.