65! Getting closer and closer to the end… and I’ll be honest, I’m feeling like I want to change things up these past few days. But I won’t. Not until I’ve met the 90 day commitment.

Sticking to the diet today was pretty easy, no temptations or anything like that. Really both times I ate it was just kind of… because it was time to eat. Note that in the morning I am typically just doing a bulletproof coffee in lieu of food – for those of you who don’t know, that’s a cup of coffee in which is mixed 1-2 tablespoons of MCT oil and 1-2 tablespoons of butter. I typically will do 2 of each, so there’s probably something in the neighborhood of 400 calories in it, so it’s enough to get one through the morning.

Stagnation continues today, which I find to be pretty annoying. That’s a big part of why I want to change things up, I feel like my body has adjusted to what I am doing.

Anyway… 65. There’s not really anything interesting about this number out there that a quick google search can find… so we’re going with: The traditional retirement age in the US and some other countries.

64. Oh man, I almost forgot about this. Posting real quick before I head to bed.

Diet goes ok – another scale uptick – super annoying – Hopefully it goes back down.

Here’s hoping for a good day tomorrow.

64… 64… that’s the total number of black and white squares on a chess board!

63! I’m a bit late again… I need to start typing these up a bit earlier.

Luckily, there isn’t really anything to say today. Diet continues to go well, still keeping up with the reading, I do have to admit I’ve not been keeping it up with my writing so much.

I’m hoping rain isn’t quite as bad as it looks like is being called for tomorrow, as I’d like to get a run in and… don’t really want to have to try to get myself to run in the rain. Hopefully there will be a light period in the evening.

Now then.. as for 63… it’s the number of chromosomes found in the offspring of a donkey and a horse. Now that’s useful knowledge for you.

62! Yet another day down.  28 days, or 4 weeks, to go!

So I promised an update concerning what I plan to do once I reach the end of this meat and vegetables only diet. I can’t imagine that anyone really cares much, but, if you’re curious, here is some of what I have decided so far… pretty much only the stuff I am completely certain about.

At the end of it, I will first assess whatever my current weight is at that time. If it is above 174, then I will continue to pursue a weight loss diet to continue to lose weight. If by some chance it is 174 or lower, then I can’t say for certain what decision I would make, but probably my real target will be somewhere between 165 and 170. That would put me solidly in the “healthy” weight range of the BMI (the upper limit on that for me is 174, which is where that number came from).

In all likelihood, I will not quite have achieved the initial 174 goal though – keep in mind that would be ~15 pounds over 4 weeks, which would be quite rapid.

An option I am keeping open is an extension of the same diet I have been doing. I am potentially willing to continue it up until Thanksgiving, at which point I will definitely eat some things that are not allowed on this diet… haha. I don’t *THINK* I am going to continue it for that long though. I will not make a solid decision about an extension until I reach the end of the 90 days. That’s what I committed to, and once that commitment is complete, I can make some new commitment if so desired.

Barring a cheat day for Thanksgiving, when, as I said, I will be eating what I please, I intend to reintroduce things slowly, probably starting with either dairy or fruit. I also think I will continue to take a “no sugar added” approach for awhile (again, barring any designated cheat days). I will also begin  tracking my calories. I’ve sort of loosely done it here and there as I’ve been doing this diet, and I know they’re pretty low (Most days probably 1300-1500). To maintain at 170, I could up that by 1,000, so I don’t think it’s impossible… I just need to take things slow and reintroduce things in a way that I can learn how to moderate them. Beans will be another thing that gets reintroduced early on. I’m not actually a big fan, but I think the carbs they provide will be a big help with the running.

And, I’ll probably start allowing whiskey right off the bat as well. I really want beer, but I’m probably going to restrict it to “special circumstances” (ie, I will never have a beer alone in my apartment – only if I’m out with a friend, etc).

So, that’s kinda sorta what the plan is. But there’s still 4 weeks to go before I get to it.

62. Breaking Bad has 62 episodes. The 62nd element on the periodic table is Samarium, which is used to treat lung cancer.

See you for 63!

61. This post will come up a few minutes late as I waited until almost midnight to start writing it, but.. oh well.

It was another fairly typical day in regard to diet and such.  No major struggles, all rules followed, etc. Oh, I did start the day at a new low, so, that of course is always a nice thing.

I also found an app for tracking weight that is going to replace the web-based tool that I’ve been using for years. Both the old tool and this app track the trend of your weight, to sort of normalize the ups and downs. The app will be a little more convenient as I can enter it on my phone without the need to get on a computer. Additionally, it makes projections based on the trends, so it might help me with mitigating my expectations a little bit.

I haven’t forgotten about how I said I was going to share some information about what I plan to do after the end of the 90 days today, but, I’m going to delay it for now… probably just until tomorrow. I’m just a bit tired, and would rather just be done with this for the night.

Anyway, 61. Here’s a quick and simple one. It’s the number of points required to win a “standard” game of Cribbage

60. It’s another good number. That’s 2/3 of the way there. And that’s pretty exciting.

Other than that milestone, today is largely a nothing day. No real weight change, nothing of significance diet-wise today… it’s just another day. I’m just really glad that the random mind fog I experienced on Tuesday has stayed gone.

So today will be one of those super short posts, because I really have nothing much to say.

So, 60. As you know, there are 60 seconds in a minute, and there are 60 minutes in an hour. Not exactly a thrilling fact to learn, I know. But do you know why this is the case? You can thank the Babylonians, who used the sexagesimal (base 60) number system they inherited from the Sumerians for their astronomical calculations. Their techniques were later adopted by the Greeks.

That’s also why there is 360 degrees in a circle. And also geographic coordinates use the base 60 number system.

We don’t use astronomical time anymore though, we use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time… I think someone screwed up on the acronym). So we redefined a second as the duration of 9,192,631,770 energy transitions of the cesium atom. Then, to keep in line with astronomical time, we make adjustments, kind of like we do with days in a year on a leap year. So some of your minutes are a bit longer than others. Every ten years, you get eight 61 second minutes.

59. Good news… I no longer want to quit. I made myself a bulletproof coffee and I think that made an enormous difference in terms of my brain working… I still felt kind of foggy this morning and thought it would be a miserable day, but I drank my bulletproof and then by the time I got to work things were feeling better. Weight also dropped back to what it had been on 57, so, all things considered, pretty good. I was obviously feeling super discouraged yesterday, not so much now.

I’m also just back in from a run. I ran out of energy and had to walk some on this one, but it wasn’t too bad. I think the diet theory is the right one… I just need more carbs to be able to consistently run 5k.

Now… 59…   Apparently, the 59 Club is a British motorcycle club with members distributed internationally. It was founded in… 1959.

58. It might be my least favorite number now.

Today has actually been a really hard day, diet-wise. I haven’t felt all mentally foggy since like day 4,  but I did today, and I still kinda do. Suffice to say, if yesterday was a feel-good kind of diet day (and it was), today is the opposite. I started off with a weigh-in that had me up another pound, which is frustrating because I was finally back to where the previous low point, from like a week ago had been, after stagnating for a week I felt like it was finally going to go down.

I’m trying to remember what I wrote yesterday, that non-scale progress is still meaningful, but, I can’t help but feel frustrated. Today is the kind of day where I feel like giving up and throwing in the towel. It’s really probably the first day that I’ve felt this way since I started the diet. I don’t *THINK* I would have eaten it if it had shown up at work, but I really, really wanted pizza in a bad way today. I’m glad there wasn’t any there, because I don’t want to find out if I would have had the willpower today.

I don’t know, it’s a day like today that makes me wonder how well I will really stick to a decent diet once I am done all this (granted, to maintain my goal weight I could probably eat considerably more calories than I am eating now). Suffice to say, I made it through the day, and at this point if I start to feel like I need to eat something I’ll just go to sleep… so I didn’t give up, but I really wanted to. I’m hoping for a better day tomorrow. I think I’m going to make myself a bulletproof coffee tomorrow morning, maybe it will make for a better day.

Tomorrow will also be my next run, and I hate to think what would have happened if I’d been planning on running today… I almost surely would have skipped out on that, or it would have been a miserable run on top of a crappy day.

Anyway, that’s enough complaining from me.

58…  If you watch long enough he’ll explain to you how you should be glad you aren’t danish so you can know how to say 58. It’s kinda interesting.

57! What a day. I realized I have 5 weeks left on the diet. That doesn’t really sound like that much. Actually it was 5 weeks on Saturday, so, less than 5 weeks. That’s pretty cool.

Lots of rain today, but, it was work from home, so, didn’t matter much… I just chilled inside and did my thing. I’m reaching the end of my training period, not that I won’t still have some training to do, but pretty soon I’ll be sort of full fledged. Really all that means is I’ll also be on phones.

Oh yeah, after the run last night, I hopped on the scale and saw the lowest number I’d seen yet. It popped back up a pound or so this morning, but that can be expected. It inspired me to look through some of my “coming soon” clothes again. It doesn’t seem like that long since I went through them before (in fact, I just checked, basically just a week), but I can tell a difference… not a huge one, but a couple of the shirts that I considered not QUITE there last time seem to fit now, and a pair of jeans as well. The number on the scale actually is pretty much the same… it kinda stagnated and fluctuated, as it is wont to do… but that is why it’s good to remember that those numbers don’t mean everything.

So, for the sake of just having a general number to give, I’m presently roughly 190. When I started I was roughly 217. My initial weigh-in was on a totally different scale, so I don’t know that the numbers directly correlate, but, that’s essentially 27 pounds in 57 days. My goal is to get into the upper end of what BMI says is my healthy weight range. So the upper limit on that is 174.

Now, *IF* I were to lose weight at the same average rate (roughly a half pound per day), then at the end of the 90 days, I would be pretty much right there. I don’t expect that will be the case. But, I’m happy to hope it. As I’ve said before, what I ultimately do post the 90 days will largely depend on where I am once I reach it. I’ve pretty much decided one thing, but I’m going to wait for Day 61 to talk about it. Hopefully I remember.

Reading and writing is already done for today. For writing, I didn’t actually write words in the story I am writing, but I *DID* write words related to it, figuring out some details about a character that I needed to flesh a little bit of stuff out on in order to really continue in the story. So I think that will be my little modification to the rules for writing, either write something in the story each day, or work out something that needs to be worked out.

Now, 57. Expedition 57 will be the 57th expedition to the International Space Station, and is happening here in October. Except of course for the fact that the earth is flat and space stations are a figment of our imagination. This will be our 57th delusion.

56. Phew. I just finished a run about 15 minutes ago… thought I’d hop on here and knock this post out of the way.

It was very hard to convince myself to go for a run. I argued with myself about it for awhile. The thing that convinced me to do it? Thinking about the fact that I’d have to admit on here that I didn’t do it again. After I finished the run, I thought about how glad I was I did it, because I suddenly remembered how lame I felt when I didn’t do it yesterday. Funny that didn’t come to mind until then.

It was actually a good run. It’s the 2nd run in a row that I was actually able to keep it going for the whole 5k. I’m wondering if maybe it’s the fact that I had so many days of rest between runs… I’m not sure, but I know I had several days of rest before my last run as well. I’m going to try to run again here on Wednesday, that looks like the next day with decent weather. Maybe I’ll find out then.

I did a bit more writing today… a little more than yesterday. Writing will be trickier than reading though. In part because there are some ideas I need to work out, and that can be a little harder than just writing a few words down. But I’m going to keep with it anyway, and hope that it starts to get smoother and easier as time goes on.

Anyway… 56.