Week 2

The title of this post doesn't really hold any significance. I've been dieting for three or four weeks now. For the first week, I didn't have a bathroom scale. But now I do and I weigh myself every week, only once. I don't really know the rules of weighing myself. Is one day of the week better than another? Is evening better than the morning? I don't know. But I try to keep it consistent. And I make sure it's only once a week.

Today I took my third reading, so let's consider this week 3 (though I don't feel like changing the title). My first success was eating much less. It only took a few days of rationing for my body to get used to less food. I rarely get that fierce hunger that I used to get before eating. And I don't really get the urge to snack after dinner like I used to. It also helps that I am out of the house all day and not sitting around with nothing else to do. I've melded breakfast and lunch into one meal, and it's usually just a scrambled egg or a cup of yogurt. Unfortunately, I'm very particular about my yogurt, so it's an egg more often than not.

I've been drinking a ton of water. Like half a gallon a day. It has replaced most of the fluids I consume daily. I was already pretty good about what I drink; no sodas or energy drinks. But I would usually drink one or two full glasses of chocolate milk and a glass of orange juice. So I've been cutting back on that.

I should also mention that I biked back and forth to work this morning. I should try to do that every morning (pending reasonable weather). Then again, every summer I make the same promise to myself, and every summer, once the mornings start heating up, getting to work drenched in sweat at sunrise loses its appeal. Last week, I went for a run around the block with my dog. He's basically a gazelle, so my jogging pace is just a comfortable trot for him. But he kept me moving about as effectively as grabbing the handles on a treadmill, so that helped. Maybe I'll trade off biking and running in the future.

I find that at least once a week I end up eating more than I really should. It's not intentional; on average, I eat out or with friends once a week, and I am pressured to eat something I really shouldn't. And I hate leaving food on the plate at a restaurant. The other day I had a fajita. Shame on me.

I've also been experimenting a bit with vegetarianism. I guess that sounds silly. Basically I challenged myself to go without meat for a few days. Turns out it's not that hard. I'm definitely not becoming a vegetarian any time soon, but it felt good to eat only fresh fruit and veggies for a period. The hard part is finding a balance. I'm simply not hungry enough to eat what I should. I bought fruit to eat in the evenings instead of snacks, but like I said, I don't even get the urge.

In my original post I said that my only goal was improvement. Well, I'm making progress. It seems slow, but it's there. And it's starting to show. It's definitely the progress I need to keep going. I do have a real goal set now, but I don't want to type it because then I'll be anxious about it. We'll see how things go.