Right. Some context: I have been a baker for 22 years. I get up at 4am and make bread for a living. I am currently on day 6 of a 14 day liver shrink diet, which for me (per my team's sheet, I know they all differ) is shakes, a very unexciting list of vegetables, and precisely zero of the thing I make with my own hands eight hours a day.
Yesterday I caught myself just SMELLING a sourdough for a good thirty seconds like some sort of bread sommelier. My apprentice has stopped making eye contact. Last night the family ordered pizza, which they were fully entitled to do, and I sat there with my shake like a man at his own funeral buffet.
I'm doing it. I haven't cheated. Surgery is the 16th and I want my liver small and cooperative. But I need somewhere to be dramatic about it, so: official moaning thread. What nearly broke you, and what got you through the fortnight?
Day 6 was my rock bottom too, there's something about the end of the first week. So you're moaning right on schedule.
What nearly broke me: my husband innocently making toast on day 5. TOAST. The man still hears about it.
What got me through: shakes served properly cold with lots of ice, they're twice as bearable. Clear broth in a mug in the evening so my hands had something warm to hold, which turned out to be half of what I missed about food anyway. Going to bed embarrassingly early, you can't crave crumpets while asleep. And honestly, keeping the reason in view: my surgeon explained the diet shrinks the liver so they can see and work safely, and once I framed every horrible shake as making his job easier on the day, it went down differently. Still horrible. But purposefully horrible.
Week 2 is genuinely easier, most of us find. The fog lifts, the hunger goes weirdly quiet, and by the last days you're mostly just bored. You're closer to done than you think.
Solidarity from someone who did her fortnight last winter. Peppermint tea, early nights, and repeating "it's two weeks, I've had colds that lasted longer" got me through mine.
Fishing saved mine. Can't eat bread on a riverbank if you didn't bring any. I planned something out of the house for every weekend day of the two weeks and it was the sitting-at-home days that were dangerous. Also day 10ish the whole thing suddenly got easier for me, hang in there.
A baker doing the liver shrink diet might be the single most heroic thing this forum has hosted. Moan away, Pete, you've earned it.
Mine nearly undid me for a different reason. After twenty-odd years of yo-yo dieting, two weeks of shakes felt horribly familiar, like the opening scene of every diet that had ever failed me, and I had a proper wobble about whether the surgery would just be one more of those. What helped was exactly Donna's reframe: this wasn't diet number forty-one, it was preparation for the thing that ended the cycle. And it was the last "first week of a diet" I ever had to do. That thought carried me through the back half of the fortnight better than any broth did.
I put the whole run-up, liver shrink misery included, in one place here: preparing for gastric sleeve surgery. And the standing reminder for the thread, since versions of this diet vary a lot: your own team's sheet is the only one that counts, so moan here, but follow yours. Rooting for you and your cooperative liver on the 16th.
Reporting back from the other side. Surgery happened on the 16th, home now, shuffling about and sipping water like it's a fine wine. Surgeon said the liver had behaved itself nicely, so apparently the fortnight of misery did its job, and fourteen days of moaning on here did mine.
Thanks all. Whoever finds this thread mid-shake at 9pm: cold shakes, early nights, moan freely, it ends.
