Slothy

Before we begin, I want to say that if you're coming in here expecting recipes or for me to try new foods, you should probably just turn around and head on back to the forums. I'm a terrible cook, care little for the effort that making interesting food takes, and would be perfectly happy to eat nothing but ground beef all day everyday for the rest of my life.

So what am I going to be doing here? My plan is to do a regular series of posts on my diet, the experiments I plan on performing with it, and the results I experience. Not just results in terms of fat loss though (although I'm hoping for some of that). I plan on recording as much as I can about everything from my gym performance to my mood as I play with the variables involved in what I shove in my mouth, and be perfectly honest about how it all effects my body. I'm not only hoping to get a better handle on how food affects me physically and psychologically, but hopefully to give everyone else an idea of how food affects us as well and perhaps some ideas on how to tweak your own food intake depending on your goals. And hopefully, this process of keeping a semi-regular blog will help keep me more focused, consistent, and accountable as things go on.

My life the last several years:
Now before I get down to the nitty gritty of it all, I think it's best to share some things up front. First things first, I spent much of my younger days eating complete tit and paid for it. By the tenth grade I not only had a wicked sweet tooth, I was about 265 lbs. at my heaviest when I finally decided to try and eat better and exercise more. Like most people, that meant cutting out junkfood like chocolate, candy, and chips mainly with little attention paid to my diet beyond that. I eventually dropped down to the 225-235 range where I stayed until University where at various points I let me weight creep back up again before dropping the extra pounds. But about the only thing I did learn for certain during this time is that exercising a lot does not give you free reign to eat whatever you want.

Fast forward a few years to my post-University life and things get a little more interesting for lack of a better word. I put on some weight again while working my first job out of University, but managed to lose it while farting around with low carb eating and CrossFit on my own at home. Then I got laid off, a month or two later the hopelessness crept in, and I'm in a full blown depression. It's important to note that I've struggled with depression on and off since then. After moving back home with the wife and starting at a CrossFit gym regularly I tried to keep my diet in order and I was losing fat and putting on muscle but there were some issues. I had a much harder time coping with my depressive episodes when they'd rear up, and when I was working at a call center things eventually spiraled so out of control that I started thinking about suicide. It's two years later and obviously I'm still here so I'm handling things better now, but during that time I stopped paying too much attention to diet. Sure, I'd have periods of a few weeks where I'd eat really well, and most of my meals weren't actually that bad. I did, however, let myself get away with cheating a lot more, in large part because many days I simply didn't have the energy to even care enough to eat properly, let alone do it.

As a result, my weight ballooned up to about 290-295lbs. now. I'll add that because I still do CrossFit as often as I can, much more of that is muscle than it was when I was in the tenth grade, but it's also about 50 lbs. heavier than I was when I was at my leanest doing CrossFit, and I'm looking to change that, as well as try and get a better handle on my depression. The latter is especially important to me right now as I've noted some dietary links in the last year or so which could have been exacerbating things. And really, who the hell wants to be depressed? Even if I don't lose much weight right away I think I could settle with the short term success of being able to go a week without feeling like the world might as well be ending.

So that's where I'm starting at: 26 years old, 6'2", 295 lbs., and ready to dive into all manner of science, food logs, and journals to figure out what I've been doing wrong and fix it, and hopefully the rest of you might find this, if not beneficial to yourselves, interesting at the very least.

My next post will likely come tomorrow. I'm going to dive into a recent first attempt at changing my diet, where I benefited from the changes and where I didn't, and where I'm going to take things from there. I'll also go into some rough numbers on how much I plan to eat each day and what the composition of foods is going to look like.

We'll also see what happens when I completely ignore everything that the USDA and any other government agency has ever said about eating healthy in the last 50-60 years.