Due to an interesting fact about how I time these updates, now I have two in the same month. I won’t have another until most of the way though June though. The diet has been going pretty well in May, mostly keeping to the ketogenic diet (essentially very low-carb). The scale is still bugging me on the day-to-day, but I’ve started doing some things which help my outlook directly after the daily weigh-in, so it’s not too bad.

One thing that I really like about the ketogenic diet is that I can eat a lot of meat. I’ve been a meat eater for a very long time now, and I don’t expect to go vegetarian anytime soon. My normal breakfast is made up of eggs and some breakfast meat. For most of April and May it was bacon all the time, but I’ve been mixing it up by switching to some breakfast sausage lately sometimes. I try to make my breakfast a reasonable amount of carbs because I don’t expect to eat throughout the day.

Another nice thing about the ketogenic diet is that on the days when I am not keeping strict count of my calories, or when it is difficult to count the calories because I am going out to eat or something, then I can still stick to my diet without too much fuss. I just avoid all bread, potatoes, sugar, and I guaranteed to keep on the diet. Doing it with both the low-carb and the low-calorie seems to be having an effect, keeping me on my 2 pounds a week goal.

Exercise has been pretty consistent this month, consistently hitting my goals of 5 days a week with taking a day off every 2-3 days normally. One of the nicest things about this time of year is that it is not completely muggy yet, and it also is warm enough to walk around, so I’ve done a couple of nice long walks around the neighborhood. Other than that, I’ve made a habit of watching some educational videos while I’ve been working out, a ton of which are available on youtube thanks to google. Google I/O was last month which means that there are a lot of good talks that I’ve watched that are relevant and recent.

Cheat days have been a little more fast and loose than I have really wanted in this month. My willpower has been a little down lately, and I don’t really know why. It might also be that the progress that I’m making is just making me think that the cheat day schedule isn’t all that important. I took one cheat day on the day of the Doctor Who Meetup, and another on the seventh. The one on the seventh was almost a whole week early, but it made it so that the one on the meetup day lined up so I didn’t care that much.

I feel like I need to plan out my cheat days a little more, becuase twice in the last three times I’ve made the decision to take a cheat day part way through the day - it feels more like my willpower is breaking than I am actually sticking to a diet plan. There are good arguments that I can make in my head for both of these methods of taking the days. On the “planned” side of things, I can feel more like I’m sticking to a plan, and I can plan out the breakfasts as well – pancakes are one of my weaknesses with regards to carbs. On the “unplanned” side of things, I can try to stay off of the carbs for as long as possible, and it is more spontaneous, and if there is a full day where there is nothing to eat but something that includes carbs, I don’t need to starve myself. I’m still not sure what is the best way. I’m going to try this month to stick to the “planned” method a lot more, and see how it goes.

Practice days are making a comeback into my diet, in the form of says where I don’t care that much about carbs, but I still try to make an effort to avoid the big sources - this means no bread or sweets, but I can have maybe one dessert in the day, or maybe I skip all the meals.

The thirty day graph is looking pretty good, with almost all of the points below the trend line. The beginning of the month and the seventh being the blips above the line because of the cheat days within the month. Interestingly the second cheat day in May didn’t produce an above-the-trendline day at all, although you can kindof see it in the data points. Overall I like seeing this much green in the graph, and the calculated calorie deficit is looking pretty good too.

Again the year graph looks pretty awesome. The trend line is looking pretty straight and the overall loss of almost 40 pounds is really great. I haven’t seen any difference in the speed of weight lost between when I was just doing the low calorie diet and the ketogenic diet. It makes me think that maybe the only benefit of the ketogenic diet is adherence.

Lately I’ve been using a new service called Beeminder in order to make my daily weigh-in less impactful. I get a graph like this every day, with the trendline similar to the physicsdiet one, but it gets updated every day. Another thing that I like about it is the “yellow brick road”. Mine is set to about 0.5% lost per week, which is the semi-default setting. I have been thinking about changing it to be a little more agressive, but because it’s a beta service you have to email the owner of the site to change your goals. I interact with it by email mostly, and I look at the graph every day as I’m having breakfast and it reminds me that even if I have a more “up” day that I am still below the trend.

I’m getting dangerously close to my short term goal of 250 pounds. I definitely will keep going until I hit 240, because then I will be 100 down. Before and after pictures will come then. At this rate, I will probably be there either at the next checkin or the one after.