Week 3, Day 1

I've managed to survive two weeks so far, and I don't believe I've gone over my carb limit more than once or twice, and even then, only by a very little.

It's strange feeling such a strong shift away from the constant desire for food, and easily overeating every time I'm hungry. Similarly, I'm not finding myself craving the "bad foods" in the way I did prior to starting and at this point, I only want food with carbs incidentally, rather than because of the carbs. This weekend in particular was tough because I wanted to eat at my favorite place in Philly, but the food there is far outside my carb limit.

In other news, I'm down a total of 12.4 lbs so far, having hit 323.6 yesterday afternoon.

I will say, I am looking forward to my "cheat week", where we'll be trying out a bunch of healthy, but higher-carb recipes from the "Thug Kitchen" blog.

Day Four!

Things have gone surprisingly well so far, given my previous experiences with trying to do low-carb and/or calorie-restricted diets. I do still really want to eat bread and sugar and such, but I assume those cravings will be curbed with time. As it is, as soon as I eat something with any kind of significant carb load (like a piece of dark chocolate) in order to reach my 20g goal for the day, I immediately find myself wanting to eat a lot more food.

Having read a few books about this stuff, it's interesting to finally be aware enough to experience the sensation of being "full" after eating only a small amount of food, unlike my carb-heavy eating which tended to involve eating until I felt like shit or thought "Why did I eat that?"

Weight is down to 331.4 pounds, marking almost 5 pounds since Monday. A consequence of the drastic change, no doubt, and I don't expect this pace to hold for long.

This weekend will be an interesting challenge, with a dinner at a friend's house Friday night and a wedding (no doubt replete with foods I cannot, or should not, eat) on Saturday. Maybe I'll bring some nuts.

Day 1 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the non-Carbs)

Today is officially day one of my going ketogenic, with the assistance of my lovely wife, Beth.

I've said it before, but I'll do so again: I intend to keep this up-to-date unlike every previous blog I've attempted, if only to chronicle how I feel as shift from enjoying the fuck out of carbs (because really, who doesn't?) to eating very few of them at all.

I've tried low-carb and similar diets before, but ultimately have managed to fuck them up one way or another, possibly because I've generally tried to do it on my own. Managing just your own food is a bit more complex with 3 other people in the house who definitely *don't* need to conform to any special diet, but this time with Beth helping, I think it'll be a lot easier. And supplementing the kids' meals with pasta and rice and bread shouldn't be hard (and they could use more veggies anyway).

I'm going with 200 pounds as my final goal not because I've put extensive research into my appropriate weight, but more because it's a nice even number, and I know several men of about my size that can hover comfortably around that number and appear to be in decent shape. That, and my frame is pretty damn large even barring excess weight, so I suspect a sub-200 goal would just be pushing myself harder than makes sense.

In an effort not to end up with a ton of loose skin at the end of this process, I'm planning on adding some weightlifting, likely with just freeweights, to my daily (or let's be honest: semidaily) routine. Once I've gotten closer to my ideal weight (maybe 275-250), I'd like to start doing cardio at well. C25K worked pretty well for Beth and enough other people I know that I'll likely give that a shot.

I suppose there's little else to say at this point. 

I do need to get a scale so I can monitor progress, and I'll be changing up the keto thing a bit from standard by allowing a "cheat week" every 6 weeks as I've seen some suggest helps the plateau problem. Also, with a wedding to go to this weekend, I'm looking forward to what I expect will be my first explicit challenge to eat low carb when there's cake and such all around.

Update: Beth got a scale, so I can add weight now.

Current weight: 336.