Week One

Monday:

Starting weight: 81.5kg
Week one: 80.0kg
Loss: 1.5kg

yay!

When my old scale died some months ago I bought an old-fashioned one with a dial instead of digital. The digital ones look very precise, weighing you to the nearest 100 grams, but if you try hopping off and back on a few times you see how inaccurate they are - I can apparently gain or lose nearly a kilogram in few seconds of breathing! Or at least that's how it is with the mid-price ones I have bought, on a probably-uneven floor (although I try to use the flattest bit). Anyway, given that, I decided the old-style would give me close enough. I'll probably go by quarter kilograms.

I've been reading "The four hour body" by Timothy Ferris which claims to be a carefully researched guide to the optimal way to lose body fat, gain muscle, have great sex, and other things I haven't got to yet. I'm not in the market for a new diet, I like my current one, but I enjoy reading stuff. A couple of my friends have been following his weight-loss guidelines for a while. It is an extremely restrictive diet of mainly protein and legumes six days a week with a binge one day a week. And I mean binge, you are encouraged to overeat junk, I think to stop your body going into starvation mode. My friends have lost a lot of weight on it but the husband fainted at least once, hitting his head on the wall as he went down at work and ending up in hospital.

Other ways to speed up fat loss include ice baths and various supplements.

Apart from the details, he has four interesting principals:
1. Make it conscious
2. Make it a game
3. Make it competitive
4. Make it small and temporary

The first one involves food journaling or photographing everything you eat - being aware of it and tracking it in some way. He says it doesn't matter if you count calories (he totally disagrees with calories-in/calories out) or use some other method as long as you are mindful of what you are eating. A "fat" photo of yourself stuck on the fridge is also recommended.

Making it fun and competitive are self-explanatory, I think, if not necessarily easy. I always find starting a new diet regime fun, planning it out and tracking it. But how do you keep it fun? I'm not doing Weight Watchers or anything similar so I don't have a competitive element.

The last point seems to be saying you don't have to decide to give up chocolate forever, or say you are going to walk for an hour every single day. I'm not totally clear on this one as it seems to argue against the "lifestyle change" concept. He says to take off the pressure, give yourself a small goal that you know you can achieve, and commit to it for a couple of weeks as a test drive.

That was just a couple of chapters of a huge book, he really goes into detail about everything. At the moment I'm up to the section where he talks about the importance of the upper left hand quadrant (from the woman's perspective) of the clitoris.