The Diet

Hello, internet world.

For pretty much most of my life I've been overweight; from "baby fat" to awkward adolescent-fat, to "I'm finally 18 and damn, I'm still fat." I've tried various things, and going to a gym really isn't convenient; I had no car for a while, now I live probably 25 miles from the nearest gym, and with gas prices being what they are these days it is sort of hard to pay for gas to get to school [~18 miles away] as it is, without adding another 30-some mile trip to my weekly total.

Anyway. On Feb. 16 I went to a scholarship competition, and a number of things made me realize that I really need to lose weight.
1. attraction is pretty much never mutual
2. I'm going to college in the fall, and I want it to basically be a skinnier, happier me going; not the same old me who has lugged around so many pounds of excess weight for all of these years.
3. for my health- I don't want to die when I'm 35.
4. intangible benefits, I guess

So. I started watching what I ate Feb. 17, and began drinking a lot more water. At that point, I was weighing in at about 209 pounds. YUCK! I decided to set my goal at approximately 30 pounds of weight loss, and after that I will see what happens. By my birthday [early July] I would like to weigh around 170 pounds, which is a big goal, but if I stick to it these next four months, I believe it is completely feasible.
[ quick math- 4 weeks a month, times 4 months, 16. 16x2 [lbs/week] is 32- which puts me in sight of that!]

Anyway. As I am participating in flickr's Project 365 [take a self-potrait daily for a year], I expected that would help motivate myself to lose weight. It hasn't, because I had not done anything to actually lose weight since before that. I will finish it up some time in August, and I would like nothing more than to be able to take a picture and be happy with how I look in it- no matter how much of my body is in it.

As it is, I weighed in at 202.4 this morning. That is a weight loss of around 7 pounds (yes, I am rounding up a bit, but not that much), after about 3 weeks.

As for exercise, I love techno music so I just sort of jerkily dance to it. When it stops being so snowy and horribly cold, I want to start biking or jogging so that I don't get too bored. I've restricted my caloric intake to about 1500 calories, which seems to be consistent to most reports as to what one should do in order to lose weight.

So, I have written a lot. I guess from now on I will update every Tuesday, or thereabouts.
-H

[also, I really want to see Diary of the Dead. Romero is King of the Zombies]

Join the-diet!