June 3rd 2013

Hi there.

My name is Michael and I am a man who struggles with many things. Depression, weight, money and a few other things to boot.

For years I have struggled with my weight. In 2011, I managed to successfully lose about 5 stone in weight. You can have a look at my old blog about it over on http://weightytimes.tumblr.com. However, in the intervening two years or so, I have been through a lot and managed to put most of that weight back on. I'm not back up to my heaviest, but I'm not far off it.

My weight gets me down, significantly. I have no clothes that fit me any more and, annoyingly enough, I can't really afford to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. More importantly, I don't really want to go out and buy a whole new wardrobe. I have a lot of nice clothes that have either barely been worn or not even worn at all.

I recently quit smoking after about 5 years of fairly heavy smoking. I know I've put on weight from that, mostly because I became orally fixated and replaced cigarettes with sweets. But, I'm now at 28 days without smoking so I feel the time is right now to start losing weight again.

To achieve this, I've decided that I need to use short term targets. When I lost weight last time, it was because I had two months to fit into a suit for a friend's wedding. This time, I have 30 days to fit into a suit for a posh work do. So today is the first day of my new regime.

So here is my plan for the next 30 days.

I haven't weighed myself yet today, but I am visiting the gym later today, I'll weight myself there and post up my starting point. I'm also going to post up my stomach, chest, thigh and bicep measurements as well.

I will be conducting some high intensity training (to the best of my fitness) consisting of several gym visits a week, complemented with up to three walks around the park next to my office and then a home workout (something along the lines of P90x, Insanity or 30 day shred). I will have one rest day a week where no exercise at all occurs.

Diet wise, for the next 30 days I'm doing some extreme dieting. This will consist of fasting from 9pm to midday every day and for the first 10 days, limiting the amount of carbs I'm taking in massively. I will be eating mostly lean meat and green vegetables, maintaining a low GI balance on the foods I can eat. After 10 days, I'll gradually start to reintroduce carbs into my diet. This also means a strict no alcohol policy with the possible exception of one day in June I will take off for a friend's birthday.

The work event is on July 4th, so at that point, I will have a couple of days back on normal eating before I commence my next 30 days (which won't be as extreme, this is just to get the ball rolling).

I hope to keep you all updated with my progress as I go.

Thanks for reading

Michael