It has been awhile since I last posted. I completely fell off the wagon. At least to the point where I stopped doing anything to try and lose weight. I think I needed the break. I can only guess that It was due to the gloom of winter. In any case I seem to have regained some of my motivation and have started to keep my food log once again. I was surprised to see that my calories were so high the first couple of days. I thought I had things in check and was still maintaining a pretty good calorie count. But I was eating double the calories and sometimes more each day. I had noticed that I was eating more. But, figured I was eating better. While I has making some better choices, I was also slipping back towards a lot of the wrong choices. Between Christmas and easter I started eating a lot more junk again. Easter was torture. The 25 pound ham that lasted for a week, the resulting 5 gallons of bean soup, the 4 dozen hard boiled eggs we dyed with the kids that were turned into deviled eggs and pickled eggs and the 10 pounds of easter candy that we swore we wouldn’t buy, yet managed to bring it home anyway.

Another torture has been eating out. A new Chinese buffet opened up about 5 minutes away, in early March. I LOVE Chinese buffets and we were there for lunch about 6 times in the first 3 weeks.

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I have been neglecting my posting duties as of late. Between the demands of daily life, the kids needs, work and my motivational problems, I have been having trouble finding the time and desire to post. I haven’t updated the weekly weigh-in for a few weeks nor have I posted my daily meals to the food diary. I am going to try and get myself back into the habit of updating these pages on a regular basis. Hopefully that will help get me more motivated and give me a reason to further review my daily food intake and why I am eating the way I am. I am also planning on installing a new forum software with more features and a more robust link directory software. It will probably be a few more weeks before I am back to posting regularly and get the new stuff implemented. But, I am working towards that goal.

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I think one of the factors in my lack of motivation is because of the project that I started back on September. I had planed on it being done by the end of December. We are almost through February and I am still working on it. My client has been dragging their feet and it is now taking up more time than I anticipated and billed for. It is hard to explain, but it is having a huge impact on my state of mind since I want to get it done coding it so I can move on and focus all of my efforts on new projects. The initial preliminary launch by my customer was the end of November. They pushed it back to the end of March. Hopefully we will be done soon.

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I have been trying to get an overall picture of what I have been doing as far as modifying my eating habits, so I can try and do more of what has worked to this point. So far, I have made some big changes in my eating habits which include:

No more ice cream – this was a big one for me. I really like ice cream. Almost to a fault. I would eat way more than any single person should eat in one sitting. In all honesty, I haven’t really missed it to this point. But it is winter. I usually get the craving for ice cream in the summer, so we will see how it goes in 6 months.

No more junk food – with the exception of having a handful or two of chips when we get cheese steaks or subs. Now some might say cheese steaks or subs are junk food. But, I will never give them up. Even if it means I will always be 25 pounds heavier than my target weight. If you don’t understand this, you have never had a good cheese steak. But, this does not mean I will be eating one every week. I will be eating less of them.

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I had my monthly trip to the nutritionist today. She was surprised at my weight loss, especially during the holidays. I lost about 14 pounds since my last trip. She said; since what I am doing seems to be working so well, that she isn’t going to make any changes. But, to expect some hurdles as I continue to lose and then she will make suggestions on how to overcome them. One thing I have changed since the last visit is that I have almost entirely cut out juices and other drinks aside from water. The only juice I still drink is veggie juice and an occasional drink when we go out to a restaurant, and the ever so infrequent beer (Although I did manage to drink quite a bit of wine and beer between Christmas and New Year’s Eve).

One thing the Nutritionist said was the we generally need 8 calories per pound to maintain our weight. So, I figure if my long term goal is currently at 175 that means I should be looking at about 1400 calories (My assessment of what she said, not her words. So, take it for what it is worth.). This has somewhat made me reassess my goal. While I see 1400 calories as a possibility, I think it is likely that I will tend to want to eat more. I can’t really say how I will feel if I ever get to 250 pounds, since I haven’t been there since I was a teen. But, I can say that I like to eat, and I’m not too sure that will ever change. I just need to keep eating better, healthier food. So, I do think with a good daily workout routine and a little more will power I could easily average 1800 calories a day which would put me around 225 pounds. I can live with that. Literally!

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Lately one thing we have been focusing on is trying to increase our fiber intake. We came to the realization that we were coming in under our daily fiber needs on a very regular basis. And not meeting your fiber needs leads to some very irregular things, if you know what I’m getting at. It is recommended that you have about 35 Grams of fiber each day. Sounds pretty easy. But, it can be tough some days to find good, high fiber food items. A few that I have found are:

• Pepperidge Farm Light Style 7 Grain Bread – Only 130 calories per serving (3 slices) and 4 grams of fiber.
• Sweet Potatoes – A large sweet potatoes baked in it’s skin has only 162 calories and almost 6 grams of fiber
• Beans – The magical fruit. We like Bush baked beans. The maple cured bacon kind. A single 1/2 cup serving has 140 calories and 5 grams of fiber.
• Pears – a large pear has a little less than 100 calories and a little more than 5 grams of fiber.
• Bananas – A medium banana has about 100 calories and a little more than 3 grams of fiber.
• Quaker Breakfast Cookies – Oatmeal raisin. Probably not one of the best choices. But, a great snack if you are on the go. These have 170 calories and 5 grams of fiber
• Grapefruit – a large grapefruit has about 100 calories and almost 4 grams of fiber

Those 7 items come in at around 900 calories and 32 grams of fiber. On the days when I am eating normal I like to try and have at least 2 pears or 2 bananas or sometimes 2 of 1 and one of the other, which makes up about 1/3 of the rdv. Other days it seems impossible to even have 10 grams of fiber.

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I have been chewing on carrots a lot more, lately. They make a great snack and the dog loves them too. I like to crunch on the baby carrots. I have found them to be low in calories and packed full of good stuff. The only down side is that they seem to have a high amount of sodium in them. But it seems like almost everything I try to eat has more sodium in it. Once in awhile I am looking for something with a little more flavor though, so I like to put a small amount of no fat salad dressing on them. That unfortunately increases the sodium too, but it only ads a very small amount of calories. I discovered almost by accident that the dog likes them. One night I was crunching away and out of curiosity I gave him one to see if he would eat it. Since then, he gets all excited whenever he sees a bag of carrots and will bark at me until I give him some. It is pretty funny.

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Today was my first visit with the nutritionist. Things went well. I was measured around the waist and weighed. As of today I am 5’8″ 434 Pounds and I think the measurement was 72″ I am almost as round as I am tall. If that isn’t incentive to keep going nothing is. Haha! I got what I am guessing is the normal banter about how I am a perfect candidate for bariatric surgery and they are right. I am huge and a health risk to myself. But, the fact is that I have never really tried to loose weight before and never even really tried to learn how to eat right. I think it is much more important for me to learn how to eat properly before even thinking about having surgery to loose weight. If after changing my eating habits, I am still huge, then I will consider it. Anyway, after the surgery talk, the nutritionist gave me some papers on how to help keep track of what I am eating and some information on what types of foods I should eat less of and so on.

I was given a goal of losing 5 pounds until my next appointment in a month and She also told me about a web site that will help me keep track of what I am eating and the number of calories I am taking in each day which is a good thing since I have really slacked off on tracking my daily food intake for the past month as you can see by the missing meal plans. The site she recommended is called Fit day. The have a great website that lets you search for foods and record everything you eat during the day. It is easy to keep track of your daily food intake and see how much fat, protein and carbs you are putting into your body, plus a wealth of other nutrition information. They also have a downloadable software application that installs on your PC and seems to have many additional features that are not included in the web site. It looks like a good application, but I have not tried it out, so I don’t know for sure.

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I have noticed that I tend to eat at a lot of places other than the dining room table. While we generally have a family mean there daily. I tend not to eat my other meals there. Usually I will eat at my desk. Breakfast, lunch, midnight snack, mid-day snack, etc… It doesn’t matter what or how much, I will sit at my desk and hover over my keyboard while eating and not really paying attention to just how much food I am consuming. So, I have decided to make a conscious effort to stop eating anywhere but at the table. The exception might be a snack (in the form of a bowl of fruit or something light) while watching TV, on those rare occasions my girlfriend drags my ass away from working at the computer. So far it seems to be working.

I am also cutting out the junk food snacks and replacing them with things like fruit, veggies or similar items that don’t have massive amount of fat in them. And don’t get me started on soda. I have spent most of my life drinking soda. Some nights at dinner I will drink a litter by myself, maybe even more. That needs to stop. The good thing is that I am also a big fan of fruit and veggie juices as well as water. So I have a good assortment to choose from for replacements. I just need to keep the soda out of the house which should be pretty easy. My biggest challenge will come whenever we go out to restaurants. I will have to wait and see how that goes when the time comes. So far it is going well. I have been having a glass of 100% juice with breakfast and then drinking only water throughout the day.

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So, I have finally got around to putting this site together. I registered the domain a while back and had planned on make the site, Built Big – A Resource for Fat People. I wanted mostly to make a place where larger people, like myself, could come and find information and reviews about products, services and just day to day things in general that would make life a little easier. I got the idea for the site when I was out with my family at a restaurant and found myself unable to squeeze into one of their booths. They had no tables. It was pretty embarrassing and I thought it would be great if there was a place to go online to read reviews by other big folks to see what places were size friendly and what ones were not. There is just so much time in a day though. I never seemed to have the time to put it together. But, I kept thinking about it. When I went to buy a car, I thought, wow, I need to get that site going so that big people can come and post reviews about the cars they like the best. It was a real pain in the ass trying to squeeze my large ass into the drivers seat of some of those cars. When I went to the movies with my girlfriend, I thought about how uncomfortable the seats were for my big fat ass and wondered if some theaters had better seats more accommodating to big people. I thought wow, built big would be a great place to find that information, if only I could get the time to put it together. When I went to buy some new clothes I thought to myself, I need to get that site built so I can see where other large folks are shopping.

Well, I haven’t actually found any extra time to add to the day. But I have decided to make a determined effort to get that site built. But it is with a twist. I decided that while I am happy being big. I will be happier being not so big. So along with a resource for fat people, Built Big is also going to be the Diary of  a Fat Man. It will be my journal kept online  detailing my attempt at losing weight. The products I try, the services I try and the results I get. The food I eat, the exercises I do and the day to day ups and downs of a 460 pound man trying to lose weight. My plans for the site include the addition of a forum where anyone can come and post their experiences with products, services, establishments, etc. Or just to come and chat with other big folks. I also plan on adding in a link directory with links to all types of sites geared toward larger people and a few other things as well. I expect that it will always be a work in progress and hope that it is at least somewhat helpful to other people out there. Welcome to Built Big!

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