Week 1 - In the beginning..........

So here it is, week one and i'm already hitting some of those first tricky hurtles anyone faces in trying to implement a whole new lifestyle. Firstly, the plan I am on uses an online calculator to determine what my daily caloric intake should be (based on my weight, activity level, etc). According to that, I should be taking in a whopping 4500 calories a day! I realized after seeing this why my previous attempts had failed. Although I had been instructed that I had to eat more, I had no idea exactly how much food this amounted to. The system I am working with now, comes with daily meal plans for 80 days, what to eat at each meal (6 times a day) and a grocery list to aid in shopping to cover the requirements. Seems simple enough:

Buy food + eat food = more weight.



But certain variables were left out of this equation as I discovered on my first shopping trip. Namely:

buy food + eat food = more weight + no money



It cost almost 200 dollars in groceries for one week, JUST FOR ME! That does not include my wife, who became concerned after filling an entire grocery cart with, admittedly nutricious, but nonetheless expensive whole foods. Upon looking at the pile of groceries and the bill that would have normally lasted TWO weeks for BOTH of us, visions of my wife sitting accross the table with an empty plate while I sat and stuffed myself on the other side ("please sir, can i have some more") came to mind. I couldn't do that to her. So becuase of my somewhat tight financial situation I've had to make my grocery budget (much like the cuts of meat I must buy) a little leaner. This means at best, maybe 3000 to 3500 calories a day. Still leaps and bounds beyond the 1000 calories I was probably managing on any given day.

So far I'm getting accustomed to the meals. They are simple, yet remarkably satisfying. I'm eating easily twice the amount I would normally eat for lunch. Instead of a can of soup, its a can of soup, a cup of peanuts, a cup of grapes, 2 slices of bread and a wedge of chedder cheese. The meals make me full, but not groggy and I'm putting them away with realative ease. I found usually at lunch I wouldn't eat very much because I would always grab whatever leftovers I could find before I left the house in the morning, and whatever I wound up with wan't particularily appettizing (especially since it was usually in the fridge for over a week). So i would just sort of poke and nibble at it a bit, have some coffee to give me a burst of energy to get me through the rest of the day, and that was it. I can't understand why I'm so thin, can you?

Thats another thing, I'm trying to wean myself off of coffee and onto green tea. I like green tea, but I like coffee more, however it does bad things to me. I picked up some really high quality green tea from a specialty shop in Elora (http://www.tanabatagreentea.com/). A 12th generation Japanese tea master with a little shop there who I've met before when he had a table at my local market. Its good stuff, the best I've had if you're into green tea, and loaded with health benefits.



As for the workouts, they appear to be quite varied and most can be done at home using my free weights set (at least for the time being) as the first few months focus on a lot of body weight excersizes (pushups, pullups, etc) and free weights. I have enough to get by without a gym membership, hopefully until I can afford one. We'll see what sort of gains I can manage with my hex dumbells and the bench I found on the side of the road before I move up to the big leagues.
Currently I'm just having trouble trying to juggle the 4 training sessions a week into my schedule but I'm sure they will settle into place within a week or so.



I promise I'll post my before pictures soon.

More to come.