I weighed in this morning at the gym- it's not official, but it looks like I've lost another 10 pounds in the 2nd week. This would put me at:

Week 1 234.5 16.5 pounds lost 218
Week 2 218 10 pounds lost 208

Not too shabby a start, but of course I'm nowhere near slim. Over the weekend I went to Seattle and the seatbelts barely fit on the Delta airlines (score another point for Southwest). On the flight back, the person I was going to sit next to, looked up with dread when he saw me sitting down. What can I say, I'm working on it...



In case you are curious, this picture above is of underground Seattle. A city under a city. Kind of...

Day 9 Optifast

Day 9 of the Optifast diet. So far, so good. I lost 16.5 pounds at the weigh in on Day 7, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I still get the urge to eat, but I find if I take my shakes on time that I don't really get hungry. Energy level is good and clothes are already fitting me that previously didn't fit. For instance, today I'm wearing my Rays jersey and it's actually a little bit loose.

Starting Weight 334.5
Week 1 Weight 318.0.

Let's see what week two brings...

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It's now day five on the Optifast diet. (The picture is from Day 3- My nephew's wedding. As you may have guessed, I'm the larger one!) So far, so good. Day One was the worst- but wasn't really too bad, I was just fairly hungry throughout the day. Since then, I've only felt hungry about the time when I was due for another shake. On days two and three, I did get some abdominal pains- kind of a stitch in the side. It's been fairly smooth sailing since then.

The toughest part has been watching other people eat. For instance, at my nephew's wedding, I had to sit and watch the people on either side of me pick from a dozen trays of Spanish tapas. So far, I've been able to handle this well. But it has been only five days. Maybe 20 days from now, I'll breakdown and attack someone's french fries. I hope not...

I put on a shirt today that was too tight for me to wear before. This makes me think that maybe I'm going to weigh in Thursday with a weight loss of over 10 pounds. I'm hoping for 20 pounds, like this blogger "Optifast Loser" registered in his first weigh in, but seriously I'm already happy with how this diet is going.

Of course, many of the urges to eat are still there. Leaving Court today, I saw the 7-11 and thought about how I often hit the place for an after court snack. Later, I passed by a tamale place that I had also hit! Strange to think that if I'm successful, my next tamale is 6 months away. This really is a vacation from food. Maybe vacation is not the right word. An incarceration from food?

Day two on optifast was much better than day one. I only felt hungry when it was about time for a shake. I did get stomach cramps twice: kind of felt like that stitch in your side. That you get when you are jogging. Admittedly, it had been awhile since I've been jogging!

The first day on Optifast

I had my first shake last night after the meeting at about 9:30 PM. What can I say about the taste? Imagine the best milkshake that you've ever had. Can you taste it? Now imagine taking a teaspoon from that milkshake and mixing it with 28 ounces of water.. That's the optifast shake- kind of bland. Nothing really offensive about the taste, but really not much taste there. But it doesn't really matter much to me. I'm seeing the shakes as being just medicine. Something that I have to take every three hours or so. I had a shake at 6am, another one at 9am today. It's now 11am and I'm starting to get hungry. I'd rate my hunger at about a 6 on a ten point scale. I understand it's going to get worse. The guy from my group that was successful in losing 100 pounds said that the first 3 or 4 days are hell! Let's see...

I'm at the morning of the day when I get my optifast product and as you can see from the picture above, my belly is rebelling at the thought of a diet! This last week has been a number of meals where I think to myself that this will be the last time in 6 months that I eat this particular item (Fillipis pizza, for instance). Now, it's time to get serious about things. Soon, there really won't be anything else to eat. And, if reading other blogs is any guide, I'll have about 3 days of extreme hunger before my body gets used to getting energy directly from my fat stores. The process is called Ketosis. It sounds almost like psuedo-science to me, but this Kaiser program has a number of successes. If another man can successfully lose weight, then I can also. I have to believe this.

OPTIFAST- A NEW COMMITMENT TO BECOME HALF THE MAN I AM

I'm the "healthy sized" lawyer in the pic. The picture has me making my vows to serve as a board of director for my local bar association. This post is my commitment to loss weight through the optifast program. I wasn't always heavy. It's just been the last decade or so of my life. Optifast will be the first diet plan that I sign up for and it requires basically 20 weeks of no food other than 400 calories of shakes that they give you. It's taken awhile for me to start the program- several meetings with blood work, EKG, etc.. But my first day on the diet should be May 1st. I plan to document my experience in this blog- both the good and the bad!