Day One

Happy New Year!  Other than recovering from last night's festivities, I haven't done a whole lot today.  I mainly just wanted to get an initial weigh-in and start to plan out what it is I would be doing.

Back in 2008 when I had lost a bunch of weight, I was doing two things.  First of all, I was doing some pretty strict calorie counting, keeping my daily intake between 1200 and 1500 calories.  In addition, I was doing a lot of walking.  By the end of that summer, I was walking up to 8 miles a day.

I wasn't really considering nutrition.  As long as I could keep under my calorie counts, I didn't really care what I was eating.  This time however, I'm planning on focusing on it more.

I mentioned a couple of documentaries in my last post.  For what I'm trying to do,  I think that Forks over Knives is the one that most closely describes what sort of diet I'm planning on following.  This film basically suggests a plant-based whole foods diet, and explores the idea that "most, if not all, of the degenerative diseases that afflict us can be controlled, or even reversed, by rejecting animal-based and processed foods".

Now, I'm certainly not planning on becoming a vegetarian,  but I think it's clear that the standard American "meat and potatoes" type of diet along with vast availability of processed convenience foods, is essentially unhealthy.

For now, there's a few different things I'm going to be trying to do:

• Incorporate more whole, raw foods. 
• Reduce consumption of food from animal sources.
• Eliminate (as much as possible) consumption of processed and fast foods.

I suppose I need to work in some sort of exercise as well.  I'm not really looking forward to that, because I haven't really done any walking in a while.  I know that it the past, I usually takes me a week or so to get used to the increased activity.  Also, I usually don't do much in the winter, although an unusually warm and snow-free winter in Minnesota this year should make things easier.

T minus 1

This picture really sums things up, doesn't it?  Hi There.  My name is Jason.  I'm 37 years old and fat as hell.

My Niece took this picture of me napping on the couch on Christmas morning.  I usually try to avoid getting my picture taken, mainly because I hate seeing pictures of myself.  Usually, I put the disappointed feelings out of my mind rather quickly, but this one stuck with me.

So now here I am, just south of 350 lbs, and not really happy with what I've done to myself.  I've been pretty lucky so far, more or less.  No real physical problems due to my weight, although over the last couple years things are starting to creep in.  Primarily, my knees are starting to hurt whenever I stand up or sit down. I really don't like that.  Sure, some of that must be part of the aging process, but weighing as much as a bear can't really be helping.

I decided that now, after years of putting it off and telling myself that "I'll do something about it next year", it was time to get my act together and start to incorporate some real change into my lifestyle.

At this point, I really don't know what that means.  Obviously, the two points of this sort of change are diet and exercise, but I don't yet know what form that will take.  I'm hoping to figure that out as I go, and hopefully bring some people along for the ride.

About three years ago, I was actually on track.  Detailed calorie counting and a lot of walking had allowed me to shed nearly 40 lbs.  I wasn't spending a whole lot of time considering nutrition, although I was finding that in keeping yourself between 1200 - 1500 calories per day, it was almost taking care of itself.  Of course, I stopped doing any of that for some reason or another, and a few short years later, I was bigger than ever before.

Over the Christmas weekend, I found myself watching a bunch of documentaries, such as Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead, Food Matters, Dive!: Living Off America's Waste, Forks over Knives and Ingredients, among others.

Some of these deal with personal nutrition and changes to our individual diets, and some of them deal with issues related to modern agribusiness and food production in general.  I've never been particularly conscientious, but some of these got me thinking about a lot of different topics that I had only been peripherally aware of before.

I'm hoping that keeping a regular blog will keep me motivated with this process of changing myself.  I plan on posting what's going on with me and hopefully getting into my (presumably) changing attitudes regarding food and nutrition.

Tonight is New Year's eve.  I'll be doing the celebration thing with friends, and not really thinking about what I'm eating or drinking. A last hurrah, if you will.   But tomorrow,  and I'm loathe to call this a resolution, I plan on getting started.  At least, starting to talk about it.

So follow along with me, won't you?