Monday Morning

I woke up this morning and weighed 203.0. Some people say that weighing yourself every day and recording it to the tenth of a pound isn't productive. I disagree. Daily weigh ins keep focus on what you're doing (losing weight) and give you a chance to quickly correct if you have a setback. of course lots of things affect your weight day over day -- what time you ate last night, what time you weigh in the morning, did you use the bathroom before you weighed in, are you dehydrated. I have found that if you optimize to get the lowest weight, ie after you've used the bathroom and before you have anything to eat in the morning, you will get a good "lowest possible weight" trend. I sometimes wait as late as possible before weighing, but that always ends up biting me, because I will have to weigh early the next day and get to work.

Anyway, what did I eat yesterday...I have foregone the "Atkins bars" (for now) which have low net carbs, but high carbs. People are dubious if they are really atkins friendly. I find them yummy, although my wife doesn't like them at all. For breakfast, which I ate late on Sunday morning, I had a three egg omelette with beef summer sausage and mozzarella cheese. To get the pan ready, I fried a few pieces of summer sausage and ate them too. So four thin slices of salami, and half a 3-egg omelette. I could only finish half. I think that's a good sign of my appetite getting to diet levels. I had two slices of string cheese and some more summer sausage throughout the day. I am not sure how many oz or whatever of these that I had, because that's not the Atkins way. For dinner, my wife made a quiche (from the store). I scooped out the quich-y part in the middle, and ate that. Left the crust behind. So basically eggs, cheese and spinach. All low carb. To go with that, we had a salad -- spinach leaves from a bag, Cardini's ceasar dressing, kalamata olives and feta cheese. Very yummy and no carbs...well, there are a little in the spinach. Atkins limits the amount of veggies that you can eat for the first couple weeks, but I figure spinach and lettuce are good no matter what diet you're on. Also, I checked my Fat percentage on the scale -- 33.8%. This is another good metric to watch (along with actual belly size). For me, I want to target about 20%. Right now, I have about 69 pounds of fat (204*34%). If I could get to 20% and be at 170, I'd be at 170*20%=34 pounds. 69-34=35. So if I lose 35 lbs of fat, I will be at about 168. That seems about right. This is also important if you start exercising/lifting weights. You don't want to penalize yourself if you start putting on weight from the exercise, but continue to lose the fat.