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. :)