It's been...

One week since I started eating low-carb, and the results are pretty encouraging. The scale said 257 today, which is the first time I have seen a number under 260 in a while. Considering I was around 265 when I started, that is some real actual progress.

Being Easter, today was not a good low-carb day. Bread and sweets were everywhere, and unlike the rest of the week, I didn't turn everything down flat. I had (smaller than usual) portions of cake, Easter candy, and some bread with dinner. I figured special occasions are a good time to splurge a little bit, since they will be rare and keep my spirits up. It's not like I was giving in to drinking a soda in a moment of weakness, which would be a slippery slope. Holidays mark discrete events where I can bend the rules a little, while getting right back on track the next day.

It may seem silly to create these arbitrary rules for my diet, but I think in the long run it will help me maintain it. The clearer the rules are, the easier it will be for me to identify times where I break them.

Given the results of this week, and how relatively easy it seems to maintain this diet, I want to keep up with and see what kind of results I can get. So far I am doing absolutely no working out, so adding that to the mix at some point could help even more. For now, I am happy with losing weight just by changing my diet.

3 Days Down

I am 3 days into my new low-carb, no sugar lifestyle and I have to say it's going pretty well so far. It's definitely not as difficult as I thought it would be to give up sodas and between-meal snacks, and it's possible to make a semi-low-carb meal almost anywhere. Case in point, last night I needed a quick meal on the way to an event after work, so I grabbed two Whoppers (buy one get one free) and a salad from Burger King. I put the patties/internals together so I only ate 1 bun total, and ended up with a meal under 60 carbs and less than seven bucks. Obviously not ideal, but much better than the typical nearly-200 carb meals I would have been eating from fast food restaurants a week ago.

Some decisions are a little more painful than others, like walking into the break room this morning with big Cranberry Orange Muffins set out for anybody, and walking out without one. As a result of this decision (which weighed a little more heavily on me than I want to admit), I created a spreadsheet called "Crap I Didn't Eat." The idea is to keep track of all the junk food and soda I would have normally eaten, but decided to skip due to my new eating habits. I put each "pass" in the left column and the total carbs I avoided on the right, and add them all up. The result is pretty encouraging, and helps me get a "reward" instead for making smart choices, because each entry in the spreadsheet is a measurable "victory." The total carbs avoided is pretty eye-opening too. Adding up the total carbs from the donuts, muffins, candy, and soda that I didn't eat (but would have!), I resisted over 600 carbs in 3 days. For a low-carb diet that aims to eat less than or around 100 carbs a day, 600 carbs in 3 days is pretty huge by comparison. And that is mostly carbs that I would have eaten ON TOP OF pasta, bread, fried food, and other high-carb meal options that I have been avoiding as well. I haven't run the numbers on what I actually am eating yet, but I figure it's at least a third of the carbs I would usually eat, and way less than what I would eat on a "bad" day.

So why am I focusing so much on low-carb rather than calories or other diet options? I still haven't really gone into detail on that yet. I know there is a lot of controversy on the subject, but I have some inside sources that have encouraged me to at least give this a shot.

So far the results seem pretty good; I feel fine and other than making some difficult decisions to not eat total crap when it is available, eating this way seems easily sustainable. In addition, it seems a good deal cheaper since I am saving $2 or so on soda at every meal. Also, and perhaps more immediately relevant, is the fact that I seem to have lost about 3 pounds since weighing myself a few days ago. I'm curious to see what my total weight change is after the full week, but things are definitely headed in the right direction.

First Day Impressions

First day trying to cut out carbs wasn't so bad. I missed having soda with lunch but it wasn't really so bad (made lunch cheaper too!). The worst part for me was trying to resist late-night snacking. I had some string cheese to tide me over, but I will have to look into some low-carb snack options to maintain this kind of diet.

Of course I am hoping to see some weight loss in the next couple weeks assuming I stay diligent. We'll see how it goes - if it's not working, I may need to look into other options.

It Starts

The decision has been made, the "diet" inasmuch as it will be, starts tomorrow. That means no extra sweets, no sodas, and limited carbs from here on out. I will be posting about my progress and impressions here as I go.

I know I still haven't really posted my thoughts about what I am doing yet, but I will get to that soon. The year is young!

Searching for a Beginning

Ok so I have decided that I want to lose weight, and I have decided that the first step to take is to cut out sodas and sweets. Great. So why am I still drinking sodas and eating sweets? I feel like I am still waiting for a date to start this thing. I don't know why I need an explicit start date, but I imagine it's a pretty natural feeling for most people. It's the same driving force behind overflowing gyms in early January; the New Year is a great occasion for making lifestyle changes on an explicit date, a la resolutions.

I could have made my birthday my kickoff day, which would have felt significant and memorable, but we went out of town on a birthday trip and visited nice restaurants and I didn't want to miss out on those things. I wanted to indulge for my birthday - one last hurrah - and as a result I have a house full of cake and ice cream and soda. It seriously dilutes the strong mental association of beginning this on my 30th birthday and stifles my motivation.

So why not just stop eating the stuff now? Sure there is ice cream and soda in my fridge, but just don't eat it, right? That makes perfect sense and the only real reason I continue to eat the stuff (ignoring the fact that it is delicious) is due to silly mental games that I play. Today is a good example: we had a staff meeting at noon and lunch was provided - sandwich boxes from Jason's Deli, complete with chips and cookie. If I had begun my "sugar fast" and I was making a concerted effort to avoid these kinds of foods, I would have just eaten the sandwich and given the cookie and chips away. However, because there is no "real reason" for me to not eat the cookie since I haven't "started" my diet yet, into my belly they went. And then of course later when another cookie was available over dinner, hey, I already had a cookie today so obviously I am not dieting so why not have another? It's a vicious cycle, and it's purely mental.

This is why I think there is some value in otherwise insignificant constructs like resolutions and start dates - it's a mental tool to overcome a mental stumbling block. I think I am going to need one, and it's a conversation I want to have with my wife because we want to do this together. When we pick a date, I will post here and log my successes/failings sticking to it. Hopefully it will help hold me accountable.

In the meantime I continue to try to do better at least. Black coffee, unsweetened tea, and water with lunch - choices that can make a big difference in my daily sugar intake. I just have to hope that nobody brings in donuts to the office for a while.

The Little Things

While I still haven't really kicked off my trying to lose weight in earnest yet (birthday weekends tend to be pretty bad times for restraint), I have been making an effort to be more conscious of the things I eat. I notice a LOT of snacking; a piece of candy or two in the break room, a cookie from a plate somebody brought in from the office, chocolate powder in my coffee, etc. There are a lot of little indulgences throughout the day that I'm not really directly responsible for and kind of eat out of habit. It's natural to grab a cookie from a place when everybody else is, but being aware of these things will be the key to reducing overall calories/carbs throughout the day.

I'm going to post some things about my overall plan plus some details this week. I'm interested in trying Low Carb High Fat, which my friends have been raving to me about for months, so I will post my thoughts on that soon.

Kicking This Thing Off

Today I turn 30. While I am trying to handle the transition from being described as "late twenties" to "early thirties" with some degree of grace, I will admit that I am kinda freaked out about it. One thing late night soul searching has reinforced to me is that I can't keep living and eating like I don't care about my body or health. I am literally too old for that.

I haven't "struggled with my weight" in the traditional sense. People who say they have struggled with their weight were usually overweight when they were young, tried diet and exercise, and generally rode the weight roller coaster for years. My weight hasn't been a struggle - in fact for most of my life I have been very comfortable with. Maybe a little too comfortable, which has led to me steadily gaining about 8-10 pounds a year for the past 12 years.

This is a picture of my then-future-wife and I in high school circa 2001. She is wearing a shirt that says "Chicks dig scrawny pale guys" and I definitely fit the bill. 6 feet tall, rail thin, and dedicated gamer, I was scrawny and pale and I ate whatever I wanted. Early in college I can remember being around 175 when being measured weekly at the blood plasma clinic (gotta pay the bills somehow) and I ate whatever I wanted. I spent 7 years in college and  over time I started to notice some extra pounds as my metabolism started to slow, but I still ate whatever I wanted. Somewhere in there I passed the 200 pounds mark, but I didn't pay much attention so I don't remember exactly when, but it wasn't a big deal at the time. I had a little extra chunk than I wanted and my body was starting to gain definition (aka, a belly), but I didn't mind much.

After college I landed a desk job programming for NASA and the extra income combined with lack of movement really sent my BMI climbing. I had a group of friends who were a little older than me and trying to lose weight constantly, so I tried to get involved in some exercise programs with them but they never really went anywhere. One year I remember weighing in at 220. Another year I was in the mid 230's. By the time we started our office "Biggest Loser," I was pushing 250. I can tell you right now that I didn't win that competition; I ended up losing Biggest Loser by actually gaining weight over the course of it.

My lack of weight loss wasn't due to lack of trying (or at least, entirely due). Some of these competitions required 5 workouts a week, an hour at a time. 5 hours in the gym a week didn't help my weight, although I did feel generally better. Over time the lack of weight loss plus my weak willpower always led to discouragement and quitting the programs. And to be honest, I HATE going to the gym - it's just miserable and time consuming and often I feel like I would rather just be fat than have to put myself through that multiple times a week.

More recently I have all but given up on trying to live a healthy lifestyle. I can't remember the last time I was in the gym and my eating habits are even worse. Louis CK sums up my current state of affairs more eloquently than I could hope to:

"My doctor starts asking me about my eating habits, like there's habits, like there's a pattern. It's just chaos and awfulness."

I eat whatever I want, whenever I want. Lunch at work is usually fast food or a huge sit-down restaurant meal. Soda is a constant. Ice cream, candy, and snack cakes are always available. I know this is bad, but the alternative of dieting and eating less just always seemed miserable and unsustainable to me. Maybe I could lose a few pounds by going on a kale cleanse for a month, but once the diet was over and the binge started again, I would just gain the weight right back, I reasoned. And without steady exercise, I would never really lose weight anyway right?

This is all fine and dandy for a 20-something (not really), but I'm not a 20-something anymore and continuing this behavior as I trudge toward 40 is a death wish. I had something of a wake up call a few weeks ago when the scale told me I was nearly 270 pounds. I never really considered myself fat, but the mirror doesn't lie and 270 is way closer to 300 than I ever wanted to be; I'm getting fat, I am 30, and I decided I need to do something about it.

So this blog is a result of that decision. My goal is simple: Lose 30 pounds while I am still 30. A year from today when I turn 31, I want to be AT LEAST 30 pounds lighter, and hopefully a lot healthier than I am now. I have a couple ideas I want to try and some experiments to run, but I will save those for later posts. I haven't started anything yet in earnest, so this will be a learning and growing process for me and I want to record all of my experiences here. 30 pounds doesn't seem like a lot for a whole year, but considering than my weight has only ever gone up, I will be happy if I succeed.