A coworker recently told me (endearingly) that I am a habitual planner. Funny, I had never sit down to think about it, but I’ll be damned if I am not, in fact, a habitual, borderline-obsessive planner. I make resolution after resolution throughout the year, related to health, productivity, work, life, you name it. I don’t necessarily carry all of these plans out, but I just keep on planning anyway.

Reasons could be:

• I suppose planning keeps me entertained and my spirits up when I feel like my life is becoming a bit too ordinary.
• I think that going through more than a decade of rigorous classical piano training ingrained in me a sense of perfectionism – that is, a constant desire to do better than others as well as myself. Long story short, I’m never satisfied.

Now don’t confuse the dissatisfaction with lack of appreciation or optimism – believe me, I appreciate every good and mediocre and awful experience I’ve ever had in my lifetime. Rather, I just don’t like to sit around. I feel like there’s always something new or better that can be done, and I have a need to pursue it.

So in the last year I’ve made AT LEAST 3 major plans around getting healthy, ranging from running every day (if you know me well, you know that I’ve never run in my life, but I actually did this for a while), going to the gym every day (also did this for a while), going on a whole-grains/fish/vegetable diet, going vegan, then going 90% vegan…. the list goes on.

Well, I have a new plan, and I think it’s finally time for me to not half-ass it and actually make this work.

I recently stumbled upon this blog post in Gizmodo, essentially an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ Four-Hour-Body, describing what he calls “the slow-carb diet.” By that night, I had the book and was 200 pages in.

In a nutshell, the slow-carb diet is as follows:

• Don’t eat any white carbs or even whole grains.
• Eat lots of repeating meals consisting of vegetables, legumes, and proteins.
• Eat a high-protein breakfast within 30 minutes of waking up, every day.
• Don’t eat fruit.
• Don’t drink calories (no juice, soda, alcohol, milk, soymilk, etc.)
• THE BEST PART: Take one break-day a week to eat whatever the heck you want. The break-day serves to prevent your metabolism from leveling off at a lower rate – thus, eating crap on break-day actually facilitates weight loss. I expect most of my break-day meals to consist of fried chicken + noodles + pie.

I really don’t find this diet to be daunting. I love vegetables, legumes, and proteins, and can think of plenty of ways to cook them. And for whatever I feel like I’m missing out on, I can just eat it on my break-day.

So last night, Aaron and I went shopping at Trader Joe’s, bought a ton of cheap veggies and beans and lentils and meat, grabbed a scale and tape measure from the neighboring hardware store, and headed home to get started. I’ll be measuring my progress (literally) every week, & posting updates on the blog as a means to keep myself motivated.

My goal is to lose 20 pounds of fat, and gain 5 or so pounds of muscle, leaving me with a 15-pound loss total. I know 20 pounds sounds like a shitton, but I’m 5’9″. The changes on me aren’t THAT drastic. For instance, I lost almost 40 pounds from 2007 to 2008 and it didn’t look like I lost a human or anything. Either way, I’m looking forward for getting back into the healthy-zone.

Helena at biggest, 2007: 157 pounds

Helena at healthiest, 2008: 130 pounds

Helena at medium, now: 143 pounds

That’s all for now from the healthy train. I’ll have updates for you next week!

hp