This is a picture of me before I started this whole diet watching and exercising regimen. Hopefully I will be able to take regular pictures that can document my progress. This is one thing which I don’t plan on doing very regularly, maybe every two or three months. Pictures have been known to be a great motivator to people on diets - they remind people how they used to look, and more importantly point out how far they have gone so far. Usually the most dramatic change is seen in the picture, even if you don’t see much movement on the scale. The picture is so powerful that it is usually used alongside actual insane weight loss claims in TV commercials. Anyway, this is how I looked when I started this whole thing.

As this week’s entry falls on turkey day, it may be interesting to note something which has been at the back of my mind during these “special” days in which you are urged by almost every sane diet plan to just forget the plan on that day. Many websites say that cheating on your diet may actually be good for you in the long run. While some emphasize the psychological aspects of having a day off, others actually cite scientific reasoning involving a hormone called Leptin. At any rate, the line between cheating and giving your diet a little boost is getting quite a bit blurred. So on this turkey day and days after, don’t feel like you have to work out extra hard just because you’re eating more.

This week I started using a new diet tracking site. This one is more closely in line with the method I used before. It’s Physics Diet, and is basically an online notebook like you would keep if you were on the hacker’s diet. This also calculates some more stuff that would be a little complicated to keep track of yourself, like Total Energy Expended (calories). It also has a nice CSV export which still allows me to give all of you your weekly stats. I’ve continued with the watching of anime while I am exercising, but am supplementing it with some podcasts and some episodes of a BBC show called QI or Quite Interesting. There is a downside to watching QI while exercising: I am laughing so hard sometimes I need to re-concentrate on the exercise so that I don’t fall over. I’m sure it’s not a bad thing for my calories expended in total.

This Week (Nov 17 - Nov 23): Minimum: 335.0 (-0.5) (Nov 22) Maximum: 339.0 (-0.5) (Nov 17) Average: 336.8 (-0.4) (136.8 to goal) Exercise Calories: 2719 on 6 days Average Calories per session: 453.1