First Fitness Blog

It has been a week so far. I have been dieting and trying to thin up my fat ass for one week. I have also decided to write about it in this weblog to give myself a good written record of my progress. The idea of fitness blogging was partially inspired by Jim Henley.

I am on the Atkins Diet mostly and I am currently about halfway through Induction, the first and strictest stage. I am also trying to get regular exercise: Pushups and sit-ups most days and I have already been running twice. (Very different than my normal behavior).

While I am on Atkins, I plan on using many of the monitoring techniques developed by John Walker for the Hacker’s Diet. On of the key advantages is that it takes a weighted average of your weights, which gives you a better idea of your trend than individual weigh points do (individual points can fluctuate quite a bit).

I, like everyone else, learned a lot about Atkins from this article What if it’s all been a big fat lie? by Gary Taubes which originally appeared in the New York Times sunday Magazine. It was quite an eye opener. Further research found more studies backing up the Atkins diet, although many doctors and nutritionists are still skeptical. Both scientific and anecdotal evidence shows that people seem to lose weight effectively and fairly quickly with a low carbohydrate diet.

However, the most important factors in my decision were the food that Atkins dieters eat and the fact they are not usually hungry all the time. My boss calls Atkins a “man’s diet” since dieters consume food often associated with men such as red meat. I will certainly miss breads, cakes, cookies, beer and especially chocolate, but I can certainly find plenty to eat.

So far one of the largest benefits of this diet has been the fact that it has forced me to cook since I can no longer order from the local Chinese place (or Vietnamese or pizza or most Japanese). Just over the past week, with the help of the excellentHow to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman and some friends, I have cooked several things from a truly phenomenal pork chop, to broiled flounder to a grilled chicken with thai spices. One of the great things about Atkins is that there is no limit to the spices you can use (provided no sugar or starch is involved), so there are a lot of meal possibilities. I still want to explore new herbs like basil, new meats such as lamb and some shellfish.

So how is the diet working out? Fine. I have had a few cravings for muffins or cookies, but nothing strong enough to even think about acting on. I haven’t gotten the famed energy boost, but I am hardly beat. My workouts have been going well and I feel the diet is helping me.

So now to do the numbers. I got a scale on Thursday, so I started weighing myself on Friday morning.

Date	Weight (lbs)
5/16	192.0
5/17	190.5
5/18	189.0
5/19	188.0

I also finally snapped some “before” pictures of myself. I am a week into the diet already, but I am definitely still enough of a fat ass to get adequate “before” pictures:

Pictures are unretouched and were taken a few hours before posting this entry. No face yet. These pictures are embarrassing enough without my head on them. I may include my whole body once I have a suitable “after” photo.