Today started as well as can be expected after a very late night. Of course, no beer makes it much easier. Ate pretty well early in the day including fruit, veggies and a chicken breast (plain, no bun) from Chick-Fil-A. Dinner on the other hand was not quite the same. We tried a new Chinese restaurant and it turned out to be a buffet that included sushi, Chinese and the like. Turns out, my estimate for dinner was just under 1200 calories.

So, crazy amount of food – way too much hidden sodium (wow). Carb specifics is something that I need to get more familiar with. Even without a ton of knowledge, nearly 220 is insane. Well, the lesson is very clear: don’t eat at a buffet for a while. A corollary, don’t let the price of the meal influence what you eat. Not rocket science, but when you map it out like this, the lesson seems very straight forward.

On the plus side, I did a fair amount of activity (not exercise per say) including 90m of yard work (lugging and spreading dirt/mulch) along with the readings from my fitbit which say I took 10090 steps today. That is pretty good – will need to watch pretty closely to ensure the reading is accurate. Tomorrow is back to the grindstone and I am very curious to see the step count at the end of the day. Also, my schedule will be returning back to normal with the resumption of work so meals will be at more normal times and sleep will return to human from the vampire hours I’ve been keeping.

I am going to try the sleep mode setting of the fitbit as well tonight.

Things are going well. Calorie intake is less than calorie burn. Continuing to track what I eat and drink. Exercising today consisted of yard work and swimming. Had a 4th of July get-together and stuck to my water and a few munchies.

I’ve been talking and thinking about some of the programs that are out there that provide food and plans to lose weight. These can have some really positive results, but where I am right now, I feel confident with my plan. There is a certain amount of learning that needs to come out of this, especially on the nutrition side. I’m not sure that the programs provide enough – or at least early enough. Time will tell if this will work for me. If not, those certainly become a very real option.

I decided to add the fitbit to my program. This is billed as a “wireless personal trainer”. It is a simple little device that you clip onto yourself and it uses an accelerometer to determine how many steps you take (to determine your activity level). It also has a sleep mode to see how well and how long you sleep. There is a companion website where the data gets uploaded and allows you to track food consumption and other exercise. This will be an interesting element to the exercise aspect of the plan. Its primary focus is on the 10,000 steps a day philosophy. More data coming soon.