As part of the process of cleaning up my life, it’s about time I did something about my weight.
It’s partly vanity of course, as I don’t exactly have women throwing themselves at me all day long. It’s partly over health concerns, as I’d rather not get diabetes or keel over from a heart attack anytime soon. And it’s partly practical, as I’m tired of jeans lasting less than a year, getting winded just going up a hill, damaging furniture, etc.
So, I’m trying to eat better. I found a nutrition program for Linux and with it I can cross-reference the food’s Omega-6/3 balance ratio against the distribution of fat types as a subset of the breakdown of calories versus the source type among protein and fiber and oh screw this… I’m a lazy, lazy man, which is what got me here in the first place.
For now I’m just going to try to limit intake to around 1200 calories a day, a number often bandied about in diet circles, and see where that takes me. I don’t want to give up too many of the foods I already enjoy now since that will just make it harder to stick with this, so the plan is to have one meal of the day act as a counterbalance against the other. For example, I intend to have my usual teriyaki chicken and chocolate milk for lunch today. I don’t have exact stats on it, but it’s probably around the same as a similar meal available at Edo Japan, so I’ll just round it up to around 600 calories. The chocolate milk will probably be another 160, and I had a cereal bar for 140 earlier, for a total of 900 so far. Thus, to counterbalance this, I’ll choose something for dinner that’s around 300. Tomorrow I might want something fairly belt-busting from BP’s for dinner, so I’d have a light lunch to compensate. My problem before was that I’d all too often have both in the same day…
I don’t put much stock in exercise, as it seems easier to just cut the extraneous calories out of my intake to begin with than spending two hours every day burning them off, but I do already walk at least 3km a day getting to and from work, to keep the muscles going and stave off atrophy.
And, since public humiliation might work as a motivator, I’ll try and keep an ongoing update of my status in the right hand section as soon as I pick up a scale.