Let’s Eat!

I’m a man and I love food.  At some point, my love affair with food turned ugly.  One day I stepped on a friend’s scale to discover that I was officially the heaviest I ever weighed (and I was never a particularly svelte specimen of a man in the first place).

I had that “Yikes” feeling and, in hindsight, I made one of two decisions that a person must make in that moment.  He either decides to change something about his life in order to lose weight, or he says, “Screw it,” and eats an entire large pizza before hating himself to sleep.

I chose to make a change and I started slow.  I didn’t hop off of my couch and go for a run before drinking a raw broccoli smoothie.  Let’s be honest, running suuuuuuucks and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you.  I did, however, download an app on my phone (myfitnesspal) that suggested calorie limits per day and allowed me to keep a sort of food diary. Some people say that calorie counting doesn’t work or that it’s not enough (though you may need some exercise in there too), but they’re wrong.  Seriously.  How can eating less and learning about the calorie content and nutritional values of the foods you eat not help? Use your head.

At first, it was hard.  I was hungry.  Pretty quickly though, I got used to the lower number of calories and the weight started to fly off.  I didn’t even start exercising yet, I just started eating human-being-sized portions of food.  For the most part, I ate what I wanted.  I just ate what I wanted in smaller portions.

What I figured out was that I could still enjoy food (any kind of food) and still maintain a semi-reasonable weight without being regulated to salad-hell.  I started to cook my own food while keeping track of the calories to figure out portion sizes.  In doing that, I figured out (and am still figuring out) what tastes good and how many calories you can cut before something starts to taste like a soulless form of itself.

What I hope to do with this blog is regularly record my dining experiences, recommendations, and my own (or modified) recipes for great man-food where you can at least see the calories you’re taking in.