The intro and the beginning

First things first... I am not going to weigh myself until I fit into my previous belt and am comfortable at the second loop. You may wonder how I am going to track progress in the interim. I can tell you right now that it is simple. How my clothes fit and how I feel. How about we get to some background info.

From March of 2007 until about December of 2007 I lost around 70 pounds and was at 279 pounds. I felt great and went from wearing size 48/50 jeans to size 42/44. I was going to the gym and was on a low carb diet, and doing resistance training in the gym 3-4 days a week. This was the second significant weightloss of my life. What happened? My high school sweetheart and I get back together, I quit my job, moved to Indiana from Florida, got another job, got married and now have a wife and a stepson. In short, through all of those massive changes in my life I let myself get off track. All of those changes have been great for me since I now am with the woman I love, have a great family and another baby on the way in December, however... I let it give me an excuse to gain weight and change my diet. This blog is an attempt to keep me honest as I go forward. This will be my second major weightloss in my adult life.

My first sucessful foray into weightloss was simple. I weighed 380 pounds and HAD to change. My first diet was simply, "do better." I started off by walking up two floors instead of taking the elevator and I limited my calories to 1600-1800 a day. I still ate horrible processed foods with days looking like one Mcdonalds breakfast burrito, one twelve inch turkey sub from Subway, and three chicken soft tacos from Taco Bell for dinner. Do the math, it adds up to about 1500 calories. I lost 30 pounds doing just this and started feeling better. The best part of all of this was I ended up finding some great nutritional information sites and changed my diet to 5-6 meals a day of healthy carbs, fats and high amounts of protein. I will go into this time in later posts, but all in all from March of 2003 untill August of 2004 I lost 100 pounds. At the time I traveled for my job to Orlando, Florida to work on the 7 hurricanes that impacted the region. Over the next 2 years I gradually crept back up as I took on a huge new job and worked 70 hours weeks.

On to how I am going to lose the weight this time. I plan on setting some simple goals each week and working towards an overhaul of how I behave. This week I plan on simply getting on a low-carb diet. I will have less than 25 (preferably less than 20) carbs a day. I am not going to track my caloric intake this week, and I am simply going to eliminate the starchy carbs.

Future weeks goals will be: reducing coke zero/diet coke intake, increasing water intake, tracking nutrition info online, taking weekly update pictures, taking daily pictures, breaking meals up from 3 to 5, creating new recipes for my odd tastes, going back to the gym, various strength goals at the gym, completing the 100 pushup challenge.

Anyway, onto what is going on this week. So far I have eaten less than 20 carbs a day for the week. Also, starting this blog is a fairly large step for me. It seems so simple now, but I feel like I am leaving so much out it is ridiculous. Small steps... Small steps. Today I went to the grocery and got some nice low carb cooking items to help me with dinners. The real trick of all this is cooking for my family throughout this experience. They are not low carb eaters normally.. My stepson is going to be 2 in August, so he should be easy to please. However, my pregnant wife loves her some cherry and chocolate ice cream. She is very supportive so I don't see this as being a real issue.

The grocery thing is a big step since grabbing food out while I transition is bad. I want to have mainly lean proteins (turkey, chicken, fish) while doing this. Not bunless hamburgers and processed cheese. I will have quite a bit of cheese for snacks, but my goal is to use healthy fats whenever possible and avoid processed cheeses.

For those of you wondering how much I do weigh right now, I can guess that it is probably 330-340. I imagine that when I am in my previous belt and weighing in again I will register 310-317. I have no idea how fast this is going to happen, but in the past I lose about 12-18 pounds the first month and a half, and then average 10 pounds a month afterwards.

What is my goal and when do I want to reach it?

Well my goal this week is to change to no carbs.
My goal is to be back in my other belth by August.
My first long term weight goal is to be at or below 275 when my child is born in early December.
My second long term weight goal is to be at 250 pounds by my first wedding anniversary on March 3rd. I can't think of a better way to celebrate our first year together than giving my beautiful wife a healthier husband.

To be honest those are the only goals I am going to set for right now aside from my weekly goals set on Mondays.

Food Eaten today:

Breakfast-
Two sausage patties (0 carbs)

Midmorning Snack-
2 beef jerky sausages (1 carb)

Lunch-
4 McDonalds Double Cheeseburgers w/o bun (4 carbs)
2 Tbsp Low carb ketchup (2 carbs)

Afternoon Snack-
1 cheese stick (0 carbs)
1 oz peanuts (3 carbs)

Dinner-
Unknown yet! I will have to add this in the blog tomorrow.

Anyway, that is all for today and hopefully a good start.