Still feeling good. I’ve been going over my 2000Cal # pretty routinely the past few days. But on the other hand, I’ve also been working out more than I planned. At the beginning of this, I thought my diet would be the most important part of my weight loss. But I’m having a lot of fun working out and so finding ways to fit it into my schedule.

Yesterday I had about 2300Cal for the day, mostly because I had lunch at Ruby Tuesday’s. Two “mini burgers”, which runs about 650Cal, fries at 350Cal, and a 300Cal salad had me at 1300Cal just for lunch. What really put me over my goal though was a relatively harmless muffin and glass of milk I had for breakfast. That 400Cal or so made all the difference.

Know What You’re Going to Have for Lunch and Dinner Before You Have Breakfast
See one of the things you HAVE to do if you are going to try this “I can eat whatever I want, just less” diet is plan your meals out for the entire day. I had a mid-day meeting yesterday, which I thought was going to be at Starbucks. I don’t drink coffee, so I wasn’t planning on having anything to eat or drink during the meeting. Since I was going to be away for a while, I decided to have a muffin and glass of milk to hold me over until I could get a bigger lunch at home.

However, on the way to the meeting I found out that were actually going to be having lunch over the meeting. And at Ruby Tuesday’s no less. Now, I could have eaten something healthier for lunch, but it goes against my philosophy here. I would have much rather passed on the breakfast, which would have been no problem at all knowing I was getting mini burgers in 30 minutes.

Yesterday’s Workout
Kim and I danced yesterday night inside “Founder Hall” at Haverford. I think we’ll be going over there for our dancing practice more often. It’s a lot nicer than trying to squeeze in our dancing in the living room here.

Afterwards, I hit the gym (fairly late - like 10pm). I was shooting some hoops. There were a couple other guys there and we played what they’re calling “21″ these days. It was nice. I work pretty hard when I’m shooting by myself, but this game of 21  was much more intense than my usually bball workout.

Also, I stink at basketball. This one guy killed us. I was able to get more points than the one guy though bases solely on my height advantage and rebounds.

I found out though that I missed one of the best episodes of Heroes ever. So I’ll need to find a way to get that sh!* online.

Today’s Workout
Kim and I had another private dance lesson today. Decent workout. I broke a bit of a sweat, probably because their heat was so high though.

I thought that this lesson wasn’t as successful as the first. I guess you just can’t beat the ROI for that first lesson. We did learn a few moves, get some pointers on some old ones, and get a nice long list of stuff to do for “homework”.

We’re going to go back to Founders Hall for some more dancing tonight. We will probably work on our Fox Trot, Rumba, and Meringue. If I’m feeling it, I’ll go to the gym afterwards again, but I’m pretty beat and have a long night of work ahead of me.

Peace out fans.

Weighed in at 220 pounds today. 221 yesterday. I need to keep this up. I plan on having a long day at the gym tomorrow. I’ve got a midday meeting and a lot of work, which will make it tough. But if I gain back a lot of this weight I recently lost, I’ll be very bummed out.

So ”fatblogging” is all one word I think. I need to make sure I write it that way if I want folks to find my stuff I’m writing. I think I’ll use both “fat blogging” and “fatblogging” tags from now on out. I dunno.

Check this out. My fat picture was in the snapshot of Calacanis’ site on Alexa. Nice.

I think I will credit our dancing for the nice results I’ve had this past week. In addition to going to the gym about every other day, Kim and I have been dancing for at least 1hr every night. Dancing isn’t too rigorous, but it’s about equivelent to a semi-brisk walk. I imagine it’s at least another 200-400Cal burned every day. And we’re having a ton of fun too.

Yesterday I ate terrible, but not too much (quantity-wise). And so I think I stayed close to 2000Cal. I had a Sausage McMuffin with Egg for breakfast. They gave me a hasbrown that I didn’t order, so I ate that too. That’s about 700Cal according to this nutritional chart at McDonald’s website. For lunch/dinner I had a dozen ranch chicken wings and some nachos at the Pike Cafe, a great place to get food and drink in Reading, PA. Chicken wings are about 100Cal each and I’d say I ate 400Cal worth of nachos. That puts me at 2200Cal. I also had a glass of white wine at night for a total of 2300Cal or so.

I’ll go over what I ate today, even though I know I’m over. For breakfast/lunch, Kim and I went to Minella’s Diner in Wayne. I had a huge ham and cheese omelet with spinach, hashbrowns, and wheat toast. I’m thinking 4 eggs, 3 slices of cheese, and 200Cal worth of ham in the omelet for about 1000Cal total. Toast = 300Cal. Hasbrowns about 350Cal, putting me at 1850Cal right there. I also had a slice of toast with jam at home early in the morning for 150Cal. Dinner was some great chicken rice soup Kim made. A couple bowels of that would have run me 500Cal. I had about 400Cal worth of tortilla chips and salsa. Later, Kim made banana bread muffins. I ate one with a small cup of milk for about 400Cal. That puts today’s total at around 3400Cal. I hope I overestimated some things in there because that’s about 1/4 of a pounds worth of calories I overate today.

No worries. If I stay on my regime, I should do alright. One more quick tidbit before I go. Last night I dreamt that I had 2 cans out of a six pack. I was holding my shirt up, and Kim was poking at my abs in awe. I woke up and took a look at myself in the mirror. No six pack. My stomach was still flabby, although less so than usual. I also thought my chin and neck area looked nicer. This is probably the most I’ve been motivated to lose weight in a long long while, possibly ever. I credit about 50% of that to the upcoming wedding and about 50% of it this fatblogging movement. Only a couple weeks old, it’s already having an effect on me. I hope we can keep it up.

New 12-month low on the Jason’s Weight ETF, and I feel great. It’s just a couple pounds, but I’ve been hovering around 224 lbs for too long. I need to keep the pressure on to take advantage of this momentum.

Spent about 30 minutes at the gym today. I did like 5min on the eliptical, then 7min on a rowing machine (those are fun-like cardio for your arms), and spent the rest of the time lifting weights. It was a quick visit cause Kim and I are pretty busy. We have a ton of new clients in the pipeline for Stranger Studios. Luckily I think we’ll have some help with it, but it will fun trying to juggle these projects with the work on WineLog, which is also taking off.

The real challenge of course will be figuring out how to spend the extra money we’re making on our wedding. Wedding are like black holes of money. Supposedly, like real black holes, they radiate some strange energy. I’m hoping that energy will make for a great time. In any case, we’re lucky to have some financial support from our parents. (Special shout out to Sheri and Manfred Wallmeier. Thanks!)

Date Night
Kim and I are going to a group dance session tonight. We’re excited to try some of our moves in a more public setting. We might have to dance with other people in the group, and it’s a good thing my weigh-in this morning is boosting my confidence. I’ll be less likely to get jealous if Kim dances with some other guy

After dancing, we’re going to try dinner at a restaurant near the dance studio. It’s a BYOB, so I’ll see what we can bring. My goal is to not overeat, which I often do at restaurants. (evidenced by the Olive Garden incident) I have about 900Cal left for today, which should get me a decent meal or appetizer, but not both. So far today I’ve had a big bowl of chilli (550Cal) with some cheese(50Cal), sliced avocado(200Cal), and some bread and butter(300Cal).

Also, I’m upset that no one has commented on my Blog Tycoon post yet. Read it, tell me how cool the idea is, and then find a programmer to make it. I want to play that game.

Have a good weekend guys and gals.

First off, I’m not talking about this Blog Tycoon, which I just found today. I’m not exactly sure what’s supposed to be fun about that game. It looks like a gimmick to get people to visit the blogs in their ad network. I’m talking about something much more exciting.

I guess we’ll have to change the name though. Might I suggest getting WordPress, Blogger, Live.com, TypePad (yuck), or someone else to sponsor your game and call it WordPress Tycoon or something similar.

Some Background: The Stranger Studios Business Model
Part of the business model of Stranger Studios is to incubate business ideas. We specialize in the prototype and the early startup phase of things. We have a long long list of business ideas. Some become prototypes that never get released to the public. Others are released, like Interactive 8ball and Mobilicio.us, but aren’t heavely marketed or developed further. When a site gains some interest and traction, we devote some more resources to it. WineLog is one such project that has graduated to the next level and will be spun off as businesses of their own.

Our original intention was to sell our projects once they reached the phase WineLog is at. The truth is that we just don’t have the experience growing from a functional startup application to a full-fledged business. However, we’ve fallen in love with the project, and are instead bringing on some outside help to continue to develop the business “in house”.

Orphened Ideas
Now most of the ideas in our bank are never going to be acted on. We just don’t have the time and can only focus on the projects with the most potential, or ones which interest us the most, or ones which we can bang out fast, or ones that will gain us contacts at Yahoo!, or ones that will draw the attention of TechCrunch… you get the idea.

And so another important part of the Stranger Studios business model is to give out some of these ideas to the public. If we’re not going to act on an idea, we’d like to put it out there. I’ll be posting these ideas either at the Stranger Studios blog or here at random intervals. Maybe someone will pick it up and make it happen. If so, we only ask that you give us credit. Maybe someone will learn something just from the idea itself. Maybe we’ll learn something from the feedback the idea gets, which will help us come up with even better ideas in the future.

I’m not a Genius
Now I don’t want to suggest that I am some kind of business genius. Most of the ideas I have are probably on the minds of at least 10 other people. However, I’m pretty smart and I do think that most of these ideas are cool. In any case, here is the first idea to be orphaned from the Stranger Studios bank.

The Game: Blog Tycoon
The following is far from a complete design document. It’s meant to get the gist of the game idea across. I wouldn’t be opposed to consulting on this if someone does take it up. Just get in touch.
Blog Tycoon would be a game in the vein of those lemonade stand games we all played growing up (here’s a decent lemonade stand game) and all other “Tycoon” games: RollerCoaster Tycoon, RailRoad Tycoon, Drug Dealer Tycoon, etc.

In Blog Tycoon, your goal is to create a successful blog site or network of blog sites. Your score would be a combination of popularity, power, and of course money earned.

The Beginning
I see players starting out with one blog and no traffic. Users may have a certain amount of income (from their day job) to cover hosting costs or possibly start out with some loaned or saved up money. (How about instead of gonig to college, you took the $10,000 your parents gave you and decided to start a blog!)

The other “currency” that players will start out with is their writing time. Every day players can write 3 blog posts. This number would go up later as players gain “experience” and/or hire staff.

Each blog post will be of a certain type: either (1) personal, (2) link bate, or (3) revenue generating. This roughly corresponds to the blogging decisions we made at InvestorGeeks. Each type of post would affect your Google hits, subscriber numbers, and ad revenue in different ways.

Alternatively, you could forgo 1 blog post and instead write 2 comments on other blogs. Perhaps there would even be a fake Google Analytics for you to figure out who is linking to you so you can go comment on their blogs. The comments would help to bring your blog to new readers at the expense of a bit of content.

The Meta-game
There would be a meta game around designing your blog. Do you go for a 2-column layout or a 3-column layout? Where do you put the ads? How many ads? What type of ad? (Here’s another sponsorship opportunity. Get Text-Link-Ads to sponsor the game and in return their ads would be ensured to have the highest ROI in the game.)

The Mid-game
Eventually, you’ll have to use some of your profits to move to new hosting, hire designers to spiff up the site, and possibly bring on new writers. You can try a revenue sharing model, which will likely fail (it’s so hard to split that $8 up between 5 writers every month). Then a flat rate model or % stake model.

By the time you are ready to start a second blog, you’ll probably have enough experience earned up to be posting like 5-8 posts a day. You’d have to figure out how to split these posts up between your blog network. Think of how much better TechCrunch is when Arrington is posting 5-times a day vs. when he’s on vacation. You might want to focus on the new blog to bring it up to speed, but multiple posts on the same day will always have diminishing returns.
The idea of experience in general could be pretty cool. I see players “spending” points to earn new abilities like: faster writing, better writing, better negotiating skills, upgraded affiliate rates, who knows.

Little side note: a cool feature would be to scrape real blog posts from the web to populate the in-game blogs. And what about getting into blog wars with competitor sites! Ooh, this game is just ripe for fun.

The End-game
Eventually, you’ll hire other staffers to run the books, find direct advertising, and negotiate your sellout deal with AOL.

That’s about it for now. I would have a tremendous amount of fun with this game. I imagine other folks would too. Think of all those aspiring entrepreneurs trying to make a living off their blogs. They (we?) check their adSense accounts everyday and can’t wait to see how many RSS readers they’ll have tomorrow. With this in game format, a day would become 30 seconds… which would make me a millionaire blog tycoon in just a few hours instead of a few years.

Let me know what y’all think. What would you add to a game like this?
Like I said, I don’t have time to program this, but I wouldn’t mind being involved if someone does take up the idea.

That’s right beeyatches. I had cookies for dinner. This is the best diet ever.

Weight Talk
I weighed in at 223 again this morning. A look at my weight chart shows some support in this 222-224 pound range. I’ve been having trouble breaking through. The good thing though is that, as we know from the technical analysis of stocks, support levels often become resistance once they’re broken. It’s good to know that in a few weeks I’ll be well past 222 and I’ll probably never weigh 224 pounds again for the rest of my life. Well, that’s the optimistic view anyway.

I’ve been writing a lot about what I eat in these blog posts, and I realize that it’s probably not the most interesting thing to read. It’s amazing how important food is in my life though. It’s a wonderful pretense for telling people about my day, as all our major activities usually somehow involve food. Even though the food talk may be boring, it really helps me keep track of calories in a food diary sort of way. So I’ll continue to do it, but try to be as brief as possible.

Total calories for the day is 2150. A bowel of cereal for breakfast = 400Cal.

A Big Lunch at the HC
I had lunch over at the Haverford College Coop today, talking with another alum who might be helping us with some Stranger Studios work. At the Coop, I had a “chicken salad hoagie”. I tried to describe what I wanted to the sandwich artist, but the guy just went ahead and made what he’s programmed to make. I usually see these kinds of situations as an opportunity to try something I might not have thought to order… like provolone on my chicken salad sandwich. The sandwich looked so good after it was made that I didn’t have the heart to take off the cheese. Ok, it just looked really good and I wanted to eat it.

I’ve calculated calories for the hoagie at 350 for the roll, 500 for the chicken salad, 200 for 2 slices of provolone, and 50 for the lettuce, tomato, pickels, and onion. That’s 1100 total for the sandwich.

The sandwich really was a beauty. The guy I was meeting changed his order after he saw it. And it was so beautiful that I made the decision to forgo dinner and use the calories I had left to have some chips with lunch. It was a good choice. 300Cal for a bag of Herr’s Kettle Cooked chips.

The State of Computer Science Majors
After lunch, I hung out on campus a bit and visited some old professors. I talked with one about how the number of Computer Science students is down something like 60% in the past couple years. He cites all the outsourcing talk as a leading cause. You just don’t see those kids who are all excited about Computer Science as a major anymore, and how they’re going to become wealthy programming for a living. I remember how cliche it was to major in Computer Science when I was declaring my major. But I was doing it for the love of the science, man.

(I just took a break from writing this to do an ab workout video with Kim. We did one that was on-demand through Comcast Cable. They have a lot of great exercise videos in there if you’re into that kind of thing. Also, at one point the workout required hand weights, which we didn’t have. So Kim grabbed a couple cans of veggies from the cabinet that worked out well.)

Philosophy Talk and Cookies
I hung out in one of the computer labs at Haverford for a bit, working on a blog I’ll be posting later about a cool game idea. Then at 4:15pm, I went to see Palle Yourgrau speak about his new book A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Godel and Einstein. It was a great lecture, and I’ll be picking up that book ASAP. Outside the lecture room, there was a plate of cookies, which brings us to dinner.

After the cheese- and chips-filled lunch, I had just 200 calories left for the day. By my rough calculations that was about two of the smallish-to-medium cookies at the talk. I had one sugar and one oatmeal raisin. I remember reading somewhere that a typical chocolate-chip cookie is 75Cal, so I thought 100Cal was a good estimate. Kim thought that was small though, and we looked it up online. Some pages had oatmeal raisin cookies going for as much as 280Cal, but then I can’t tell how big their cookies are compared to mine. I’ll have to figure this out if I’m going to be eating more cookies in the future.

Wine Puts Me Over 2000Cal
So breakfast, lunch, and cookies put me at exactly roughly 2000Cal. Kim had a nice two-portion-size glass of wine ready for me when I got home, which puts me over at 2150. I want to end one of these days below the 2000 mark.

On the exercising front, I didn’t hit the gym today. However, I did walk around campus a bit, and Kim and I danced for about 45 minutes before American Idol came on at 8 (I’m not really sure how I got sucked into this show).

I Put on My Dancing Shoes
Our dancing is coming along really well. Our waltz is great (for beginners). Our merengue and swing are decent so far. Our fox trot is shakey, but really good when we nail it. Our wedding song is going to be a fox trot, so we work on that one a bunch.
We’ve been learning a few new moves since our last private dance lesson. I hope our teacher isn’t upset about it. Kim and I are going to try to wow him a bit with some of the stuff we learned. We’ve found some excellent videos at Expert Village. They have videos for all kinds of things. For dance, I’m really fond of the ones put out by Leslie Sack.

Stay tuned for my game idea. I think the bloggers will either love it or hate it.

So Calacanis posted my fat pic on his blog yesterday. Nice. I hope he’ll follow up a few months from now when I have a nicer pic to show off.

Calacanis seems to be on a toned down version of the Atkins diet. He’s trying to replace bread and other sugars with protein and fish. I think it’s a healthy way to go. But when it comes to losing weight, I believe it’s just the calories that matter.

I hear that most of the weight loss associated with a low carb diet actually comes from a reduction in calories. However, a low carb (or rather high fat) diet supposedly makes you feel full on fewer calories. So that’s good I suppose. Studies suggest that Atkins dieters can eat more calories and still lose more weight. Thermodynamics buffs say this is impossible, but people are fighting it. If there is any truth to the “more calories, less weight” proposals, I’ll say it has something to do with the fact that eating carbs puts me to sleep (where I burn fewer calories). Here are a couple interesting reads on the subject:

• Calorie Intake on Atkins and Low Carb Diets
• Study Surprise: Low Carb Dieters Eat More, Lose Weight

In any case, my goal as stated is to lose weight without having to change the quality of the food I eat. Just the quantity. I really enjoy food, and think this is the way to go for me without burning out on this diet.

Yesterday was rough. So I wanted to start the day off right. I skipped breakfast and got right to work. I was at the gym from about 12-1… some bball again, curls, and some jogging.

Kim made the most incredible chili I’ve ever tasted today. It was made with ground turkey meat, black beans, onions, tomatoes, some other super special stuff. We also topped it off with a little bit of cheese and some avocado slices. Avocado is really awesome with chili. If you take anything away from this blog, it should be to try avocado with chili.

So after the gym I had a couple bowls of Kim’s chili. I think I’m over-estimating things a bit, but at 300Cal per 1cup of chili I’d say it’s about 900Cal there. Add 100Cal for the cheese, 200Cal for the Avocado, and another 300 for some bread and butter, and I’m at 1500 Calories for lunch. Wow.

For dinner, I toyed with the idea of eating the left over pizza from yesterday, but it wouldn’t heat up well anyway. So I passed on pizza and instead had another, slightly smaller, bowl of chili. With cheese, I’d say 400Cal there and another slice of bread at 100Cal. That’s 2000 for me, and I stop there.

Kim’s out to dinner after a networking event. I hope she’s not in the mood for wine when she gets home cause I’ve got no room for the calories. I’m planning on writing a piece about wine calories at WineLog soon. (Actually, I think one of our bloggers already did… nope, couldn’t find it. So I’ll have to write it.)

One of the easiest things one can do to cut calories is to stop drinking high-calorie, low-nutrition drinks… so-called empty calories. I only drink diet soda. I drink diet green tea from Wawa (great stuff). And I drink water during the day. The only drinks I typically have with calories in them are milk, wine, or the occasional glass of OJ. I find myself drinking quite a bit of wine “for work”, and it’s calories I wish I could pass up on.

That’s it for today. I’m going to put my full attention on American Idol now and then get back to work on some exciting stuff for WineLog. Cheers.

I needed to post another picture of me to balance out the one from my last post. I look a bit better in this one. I’m not sure if I weigh any less, but I have looser cloths on and a nicer haircut. I’ve got a bit of a double chin there, but at least I have a neck in this one.

My guess is that I am closer to my current weight in this picture. This is from Maine last August. I had just left Accenture and my project in New Jersey. While in NJ, I was going to the gym pretty regularly at the apartment I was staying at and doing well with this crazy rice diet (rice + scrambled eggs + broccoli + Goya adobo seasoning = good eats).

‘tipped the scale at 223 pounds this morning. Was at the gym from about noon to 1:30. The walk over and back takes about 15 minutes. I shot some hoops for about 45 minutes and lifted weight for 15 minutes. Nice.

And it’s been down hill from there. Kim and I had our first dance lesson today, which was awesome (and probably burned a few calories too). But I had the bright idea to go to Olive Garden after the lesson. My motivation was to try a wine they got there called Principato Rosato. The Olive Garden exclusive wine is one of the hottest pages on the WineLog site. We get a ton of traffic from folks Googling that wine.

The plan was to have just the wine, salad, and breadsticks. But neither Kim and I were both pretty hungry, so we decided to have dinner. I ate 3/4 of a Chicken Alfredo pizza. It was good. Now I’m going to find out what kind of damage it did to my diet.

Here’s what I ate today. Olive Garden items are bolded. I used Calorie numbers from this website for the bread sticks and salad and took a guess for the pizza.

• 1 cup of milk = 100Cal.
• 2 eggs = 200Cal.
• A bit of shredded cheese = 50Cal.
• 2 slices of toast, butter = 300Cal.
• 2 bread sticks = 280Cal.
• 2 bowls of salad = 250Cal.
• 3/4 of a Chicken Alfredo pizza = 1500Cal??
• UPDATE: ~2 glasses of wine = 300Cal.
  

Today’s total Calories: 2680. (forgot my wine which puts me at almost 3000 Calories… sigh) Not too bad considering. My extra long day at the gym will help keep this from becoming a total disaster. Although I’m a little upset that I had a break in discipline just one day after starting to blog about this.
Anyway, let me leave you with this picture. I don’t have all of my pictures on my new desktop, but here is the most unattractive one I could find. Jason Calacanis keeps posting pictures of him from when he was more in shape. I’m much more motivated by pictures of me looking like a slob. Enjoy.

Wow, so my last post here was before the Super Bowl. I didn’t even blog anything about how sad I was that the Bears lost. What a great great first quarter. After that, I’m just sad that the Bears played so predictably: good defense, no offense.

So I’m inspired by Jason Calacanis to start blogging about my weight and diet in an effort to inspire some discipline in myself. I use blogs to make promises like having WineLog Mobile live by Valentine’s day, and it works there. So why not use a blog to help me lose weight? I’m hoping it will prove a great motivator because if I don’t lose any weight, I have to cope with the embarrassment of having all these posts out here and nothing to show for it.

Peak Weight: 234
Current Weight: 225
Goal Weight: 210

I’m getting Married on May 5th and hoping to weigh about 210 by then. That gives me about 12 weeks to lose 15 lbs. I was down to about 222 and on track to lose 1lb per week and hit 210 by wedding day. But a couple weeks of fewer gym visits and reckless eating have stalled my progress.

Now usually 3 pounds is nothing to lose sleep over. My weight can fluctuate 3 pounds or more day to day. However, I’ve been tracking my weight’s 15-day moving average, using a handy little Google Gadget called “the Google 15“. The moving average smooths out the day-to-day fluctuations and let’s you keep your cool when you’re still on track. On the other hand, it also helps me be confident that I should actually be losing my cool. Because not only am I heavier than I was two weeks ago, I’m above my moving average. And anyone who reads my blog at InvestorGeeks regularly will know that being above the moving average is a bad sign if you are short a security (in this case we want to be short Jason’s weight).

So what else am I doing to lose weight? The main thing I am doing is limiting my calorie intake. I am a huge fan of the Hacker’s Diet (completely free to read online). The main points of that work are:

1. It’s all about calories in (eaten) vs. calories out (burned). If you consume more calories than you burn, you will gain weight. If you burn more calories than you consume, you will lose weight.

2. It is generally easier to forgo food than workout to lose weight. For instance to net 300 less calories in a day, you could either run for 30 minutes or pass on that 2-serving bag of chips. Which is easier? For some it’s the running. For busy folks like us it is often to pass on the extra food.

3. There is a reason some people are naturally thin. Simply put, they are only hungry when they need to eat and stop being hungry once they’ve eaten enough calories. It’s as if they have a watch on their wrist telling them when to eat and when to stop. Overweight people have defective watches, and so they might stay hungry even though they’ve already eaten enough (my problem). The key point to take away from THD’s graphs on metabolism and hunger is that to lose weight you must be hungry.

That’s it. That’s the secret. I’ve done well by changing the way I think about a diet. Instead of trying to game the system by finding foods that I can be sated with but still lose weight, I acknowledge the fact that I’m going to have to make a sacrifice. I have to be hungry to lose weight. And so my hunger becomes a good thing instead of a bad thing. When I get those pangs in my stomach, I know I’m losing weight and embrace it.

Based on the expected caloric intake of a moderately active 25-year 6′2″ male, I should be eating about 2500 Calories a day to maintain weight. This is pretty consistent with how much I would typically eat and maintain weight. One pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 Calories. And so to lose 1 pound per week, I need to cut my caloric intake to about 2000 Calories a day. That’s the number I shoot for every day.

And I don’t cheat myself. It’s very easy to use some fuzzy math to hide 500 Calories in my diet. Here are two recaps of what I ate today.

Today I had a bowl of Chocoalte Cap’n Crunch with 1% milk. That’s 2 serving of cereal at 150Cal per serving plus about 100Cal of milk. 400Cal for breakfast. I then had a turkey and cheese sandwich on a pita, with mayo and lettuce. That’s about 150Cal for the pita, 200Cal for the cheese, 200Cal for the turkey, 75Cal for the Mayo and a negligible # of Cal for the lettuce. That’s 625Cal plus about 1.5 servings of tortilla chips for 225Cal. 900Cal for lunch. For dinner I had 1 and 1/2 quesadillas with black beans, red pepper, and cheddar cheese. 200Cal for the quesadilla tortillas, 50Cal of beans, 200Cal of cheese, negligible red pepper. I also had another 1.5 servings of tortilla chips, with salsa this time. That’s about 450Cal worth of quesadilla plus 250Cal of chips and salsa. 400+900+700 = 2000. Go me!

Now here is an equally plausible calculation.

Today I had a bowl of Chocoalte Cap’n Crunch with 1% milk. That’s 2 serving of cereal at 150Cal per serving plus about 150Cal of milk. 450Cal for breakfast. I then had a turkey and cheese sandwich on a pita, with mayo and lettuce. That’s about 150Cal for the pita, 250Cal for the cheese, 250Cal for the turkey, 100Cal for the Mayo and a negligible # of Cal for the lettuce. That’s 750Cal plus about 2 servings of tortilla chips for 300Cal. 1050Cal for lunch. For dinner I had 1 and 1/3 quesadillas with black beans, red pepper, and cheddar cheese. 300Cal for the quesadilla tortillas, 50Cal of beans, 200Cal of cheese, negligible red pepper. I also had another 2 servings of tortilla chips, with salsa this time. That’s about 550Cal worth of quesadilla plus 350 Cal of chips and salsa. 450+1050+900 = 2400. Not so good.

It’s hard to be honest when counting those calories. Now, I’m not going to break out the scale and measuring cups every time I eat. But I am going to be conservative (towards higher numbers) in my estimates and make sure that I am really eating less and not just practicing fuzzy math. Plus, I know that I ate too much if I wasn’t hungry for a substantial part of the day. For the record, I think my numbers are closer to the first calculation.

I’m also lucky enough to live right across the street from my alma mater, which has a nice new gym. I can workout there for free, and Kim and I have been going pretty much every other day or so for a while. I’ll run for 10-15 minutes or shoot a basketball for 30 minutes, then lift some weights or do more cardio. It’s not an incredible amount of exercise, usually just 30-45 minutes. But I probably burn about 200-400 Calories and am building up some muscle, which should help with my metabolism.

So that’s the regiment so far. I’ll try to post an update, no matter how brief every day. Good luck to all the other fatties out there trying to get in shape.