If you read the previous post, you were promised information on how I plan to lose the weight I no longer wish to lug around. To recap, I’m not really very heavy. about 204 at the start of this adventure, and since I’m over 6’2″, that’s not awful, but I have a bit more around the middle than I like, and ideally I’d prefer to lose about 10% of my weight, so about 20 pounds. This would make me as light as I was entering graduate school (as I recall) back in 1978. The process I am employing is pretty simple. I’m not eating sweets at home, only eating at meals, with the exception of a piece of fruit or two, and a couple of handfuls (handsful?) of nuts each day.

To give dear reader a bit of background, I am a vegetarian, so I eat pretty good food in the first place, but am very easily lured by sweets, bread, your general carbohydrates, and don’t mind a pint now and then, although it’s rare for me to drink more than 1 beer on any given day.

During the first couple of weeks I’m not going to the gym, just to partial out the compounding effects of increasing the rate at which my aging body burns calories, but also demands them in return for letting me engage in extended cardiovascular exertion. In other words, when I exercise a lot, I burn more calories, but I also get hungrier. I’m going to try to let my system get a bit used to the slightly reduced caloric intake before reintroducing extra exertion. So, we’ll see how much I lose in a couple of week of just slight eating variation, and then re-introduce my cardio workouts (which have been pretty sporadic for the past 3 months) and see if I can continue with the lower intake, while increasing the output, thereby increasing the rate of loss. The trick, of course, will be not increasing the uptake of calories by more than the loss achieved by the exercise. If they simply balance, then theoretically, there should be an actual loss due to improved metabolic burn during passive periods (which are many). We shall see. I’ll get back to you.