Restarting

Ok, well, after not doing very well at all over the last couple of weeks, I'm starting the diet again. Still can't take photos, due to buggered camera, but neh.

Breakfast today is egg whites and spinach with a coffee. And I had a lass of blackcurrant squash too, but not very strong. :p

D'oh (again)

Not doing so well at keeping up this blog. I keep forgetting to take photos of things with my camera, and the camera on my phone is a slowly expanding cloud of silicon dust. :p So, as a result, I've been forgetting to update the blog as well. :(

I'm in Barcelona at the moment, so I'll mostly be updating once a day, possible the following morning regarding the previous day.

I actually ended up skipping breakfast and lunch yesterday. D'oh. Made up for it at dinner, though.

We went to the new branch of Mussol at Las Arenas, which is a high-quality chain specialising in Catalan cuisine. Our starter was asparagus and Romesco sauce, which is a bit like a slightly spicy nut butter made with almonds, pine nuts and hazelnuts. Very tasty (and fortunately not too much sauce :p).

My main was a selection of Catalunyan meats and cheeses, which was cheating slightly with the cheese, but I couldn't really have anything else on the menu as everything here seems to come with potatoes. :p

My desert, on the other hand, was a definite Bad Ben No Cookie moment. Four dark chocolate Mariano truffels. Omnomnom. But bad. :p

Dinner 8th October.

Beef mince with some smoked paprika and tomato juice.

Lunch

Skipped breakfast. Bad ben. Lunch is a naked burrito without the rice. Omnomnom. I got the pork filling this time.

Cheat day noms

Well, lunch was a bottle of 7up and a chicken Caesar bagel.

Dinner was at Belgo Centraal on Shelton Street.

I had this:

Three of these:

This:

And this:

Best bit? The air conn dripped condensation into my mussels, so I got a new bowl, and the drinks were free! Yay! :D

Hmm...

I think I need to write "take photos!!" on the fridge door, as I've forgotten //again//!!

Had cheese on toast today (first cheat day :p). And I was 17 st 5 lbs this morning, so slightly down on yesterday, but not massively. :/ Oh well!

Fronion soup with lentils in it

Omnomnom!

(Edit: Terrible lighting!)

Bleh

I'm not doing very well at this remembering to post thing, am I? ;)

I just had eggs for breakfast this morning. Wasn't really all that hungry. Also, I was 17st 6lbs when I weighed myself this morning, which is annoying, as I was 17st 4lbs - 8lbs down from when I started the diet! >.<

Oh well.

I'm going to make the lentil soup thing in a bit. It's a good job I actually like lentils!

Now to find some bacon…

Doh!

Forgot to photo breakfast and lunch. I had a burrito in a box with the rice swapped for mixed vegetables for lunch, and breakfast was the same as yesterday: egg whites with spinach.

Dinnah!

Cod with chilli and paprika with spinach. :)

Late lunch

Lentils, cauliflower, spinach, and rosbif. Added a tiny bit of Cross and Blackwell Browning to add some flavour, with a few teaspoons of smoked paprika. Omnomnom!

Breakfast, day 4

Well, this is somewhat late. ;) I overslept by about 5 hours as I didn't get to sleep until 4am. (The Witcher 2 is a great game, BTW. ;) ) However, I've found that, regardless of the time I wake up, the egg is the best thing to have for breakfast. The first day I had a proper lunch (the dhaal thing) instead, and I didn't feel anywhere near as energetic as I have since I started eating the eggs and spinach for breakfast. Must be the amount of protein in them. :)

ION, I've lost at least 6 lbs since Thursday morning. Unfortunately, I didn't take a measurement then, and if I compare to the night before, I lost 9 lbs. :o

Dinner

Steak with cauliflower and spinach. :)

Edit: That didn't work so well, TBH. Most of the veg went into the bin. Self-note: Mustard powder needs something to go with it, and it doesn't go well with the wrong coating. (Seaweed and dill... D'oh! Picked up the wrong pot.)

Dinlunch

Pork with mixed veg :) Tasty hot paprika added to the pan to add some flavour.

Next breakfast

Same as yesterday, minus the beans. Incidentally, I'm 17st 7.5lbs this morning. O.o

Oops

Apparently dinner wasn't proteiny enough... :/

(That's tuna and the rest of the tomato passata :p I'm not doing a very good job of this so far…)

Dinnah!

Steak in paprika and tarragon rub with green beans, cauliflower, broccoli and carrots. Steak was cooked in a non-stick pan without oil, and the veggies were steamed together. :) (And cooked yesterday :p)

Hmm...

I seem to be a bit hungry, which probably means I didn't eat enough for lunch. I've got a load of kidney beans left over, so I've got a bowl of them with some tomato passata (plain, unsweetened) and some pepper to help fill the gap.

D'oh!

Forgot to take a photo of my lunch. Oh well!

It was about half the amount of the lentil thing I cooked yesterday with a couple of large handfuls of spinach.

Fail, Ben, fail!

Breakfast

Three egg whites with one egg yolk mixed in to give it a bit of flavour, some kidney beans, and spinach and kidney beans on the side.

Dinner

Not too sure about this. It's broccoli, green beans, and chicken in a tomato, paprika and tarragon sauce. Apparently tomatoes are the only fruit allowed in this diet.

Oh well!

Glass of Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon on the side. :)

Edit: Well, this didn't really work all that well. The sprouting broccoli really needed to be steamed for at least 20 minutes before being put into the sauce, and the sauce itself didn't quite taste right. :/ Oh well! Chalk that one down to experience.

Me-surements

See what I did there? :p

Anyway, apparently I measure up like this:

Left upper arm:	16.25"
Right upper arm:	16.5"
Left thigh:	30.25"
Right thigh:	30.5" (Yes, the circumference of my legs is bigger than some people's waists)
Midriff (at navel):	43.75"
Cake shelf (AKA muffin top):	49" (Eegh…)

Total inches (I'll explain this in a bit): 186.25"

So, firstly… Eeeegh. :/

Anyway. The total inches number makes it a lot easier to track if I'm actually losing body fat, as changes in that number are much easier to track than changes in weight, which can fluctuate a lot more than the total inches number, and may not even change at all if I start gaining muscle weight at the same time as ditching the fat. Not sure how often I'm supposed to be taking these measurements, though, so I'll probably do it twice a week.

Interestingly, I wrote last night that I'd have to forego the guacamole, as it contains avocados which are quite high in fructose, but the book actually recommends having extra guacamole with Mexican meals as it contains a lot of electrolytes which you'd usually lose with excess water that the diet causes you to lose naturally. So yays! I can have guacamole in my burrito box. :D

Edit: The data above in a completely useless single-point chart. :) I'll update this as I take new measurements. Left axis is inches, right axis is lbs.

First taste

Well, I accidentally skipped breakfast, so here's my first meal on the new diet.

It's a kind of lentil/chicken/carrot/kidney bean variation on dhaal, with some Mexican spices thrown in to give it some flavour. :)

If anyone wants recipes for things, let me know and I'll post them up. But this one's just got everything listed above in it. ;)

Hello, World!

My name is Ben, and I am a musician and computer programmer. I eat too much of the wrong stuff, and I sit at a desk all day—both at home and at work.

I also currently weigh 18st 4lbs (116kg, or 256lbs). If you're not familiar with that sort of weight, it looks like this:



Eat your cake shelf, Sarah Millican; I've got the full patisserie here!

Which, let's face it, is nothing to be proud of.

None of my nice clothes fit any more, I get tired walking up stairs, I'm beginning to develop chronic back pain, and an injury to my right leg is being aggravated by the amount of weight it has to bear every day. I can't go out shopping for fashionable clothes because they don't make them in my sizes (42" waist for jeans, if you're interested), and whenever I meet someone I like they're invariably not interested because unfortunately fat isn't, and probably never will be, in Vogue.

Hence this little blog.

I bought a book called The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss. (You can find it on Amazon.) It's basically a guide to common sense, which is surprisingly uncommon. About a quarter of it is dedicated to fat loss, including the so-called Slow-Carb Diet, where you cut out any white carbs for six days a week, and 'binge' on calories for the seventh.

According to Mr Ferriss, this keeps your metabolism going, and that means you keep losing weight at a constant rate. Having tried the LighterLife diet and not had much luck with it (Three months is a long time to stick to packet soups!), I thought I'd give this a go. I like cooking, I like experimenting with a few ingredients (I can think of at least 25 different ways to prepare a chicken that don't involve rice, wheat, bread, pasta, milk, flour, or anything like that), and more to the point, I miss being able to run up a flight of stairs or for 100 metres without getting out of breath.

So, following the suggestion of the book, I'm going to be posting photographs of everything I eat and drink on this blog (discounting tap water, because that would just be ridiculous). I'm going to try to do it as real-time as possible, so that I can go back and look at how often and how far apart I'm eating things.

Where available, I'm also going to try to get the nutritional information about what I'm eating, or if it's not available at the point of purchase, I'll do my best to calculate it.

Unfortunately, it's now 00:20, so it's too late to prepare anything to take with me to work tomorrow, but there's a Mexican restaurant near to where I work that does a burrito in a box without the flatbread tortilla. Switch out the rice for the mixed vegetables, and you've actually got a decent meal which is tasty and contains no white carbs. :) Going to have to skip on the guacamole as well, though, which is annoying!

I should probably sit down and work out a vague plan for what to eat. I've got a cupboardful of dried beans (kidney, cannellini, pinto, black, broad, and split peas… What?!) that needs using, so I'm sure I can combine those with some mince, steak, chicken, bacon, vegetables, and so on to make a few variations on things like dhaal (Indian lentil soup with spinach in it), casseroles, and similar, and I can probably work out a recipe for a 'slow-carb' lasagne-type thing. Actually, thinking about it, moussaka is basically that already. Just skip the topping.

So, yeah. Wish me luck. :)