"Pfsllllllppppppppp!"

800 to 900 calories a day. I won’t lie to you, it isn’t easy that first day. You can do pre-mixed liquid or “make your own” shakes. I chose pre-mixed. They come in containers that look like juice boxes you would send to school with a kindergartner. 8 ounces of balanced nutrition. I kid you not, I could drink them in one suck. The diet, for me, worked like this…one in the morning, one at lunch, a measured meal at dinner, and one more shake at 9PM. That’s it.

My first class was a Thursday night, so the diet really started on that Friday morning. July 18th, 2008. New diet, new day. Sounds great. I woke up that morning and hit the scale first thing. 282 lbs. Hey, I already lost 4 lbs and I was not even officially dieting yet! Not true. You will weigh the least the first thing in the morning. Except for very rare occasions when you are exercising in the evenings, this will hold true all the time. If you get up and weigh more than you did when you went to bed, check the bed for chicken bones and cake crumbs. You are sleep walking. I hopped on the scale on day one and it is a ritual I continue to do every day. People will tell you not to weigh daily because your weight will fluctuate and it can be depressing. I will tell you that you need it every day. It is a barometer. Will it fluctuate? Yes. If you are expecting fluctuation and it (gasp!) fluctuates, will you be forever psychologically marred? No. You want depressing? How about dieting for a week and finding out that after seven days you have lost half a pound? How about finding out you gained? You weigh yourself every day…that is MY rule of success.

Here is what weighing in every day did for me. I should really say DOES for me and use present tense. Except for vacations when a scale is not available, I have weighed myself every morning since that day. But starting day one, I would get up, look at the number and one of two things happened.

1) I had dropped a little: I was psyched…my day was better because I had positive reinforcement. -OR-

2) I hadn’t dropped any or went up a little: My day was spent doing all the things I had to do to lose the next day.

Not only did I weigh in every day, I marked it on a calendar on the door. Having that weight check every morning, at the very least, curbs any ideas you might have about cheating. It also, after time has passed, reminds you of how much you have lost. This diet weigh-in isn’t like Christmas morning. You don’t get up the day of class after seven days of diet and get on the scale for the first time in a week and hope a nice present is under the tree. When you skip days on the scale, you delude yourself into thinking "I'm doing OK." If you were really doing OK and were interested in not avoiding reality, you would jump on the scale. So, by Dick's Rules, you get on that scale every single day and take responsibility for making sure you reach your goals.

So it's DAY ONE. Downstairs I ran and took the shake from the refrigerator and ‘pfsllllllppppppppp’ it was done. I had cut coffee out of the diet. I had the option to have it, but I didn’t want to complicate things. So my breakfast was over. How anti-climactic.

Around lunch I was really hungry. I have a job where I have a lot of meetings and they occur most days of the week. That Friday was one of those days. I kind of forgot that I was hungry but by lunch I felt like Fred Flintstone looking for a Bronto Burger. "Oh yeah...I am on the diet...and lunch is in the refrigerator. Pfsllllllppppppppp. Wow. Now I have 59 minutes to kill." You notice real fast on this diet that, around the times when you used to eat, you have a LOT of extra time you never used to have.

By about 2PM I started to get a headache. This isn't uncommon when you go from the lifestyle of Willy Wonka to the low carb lifestyle of Jack LaLanne. It happens. The good news is, unless you are having a stroke, the headache won't kill you. Just tough it out. It's called a diet. It wasn't easy getting as big as the Hindenburg. You spent a lot of time accumulating a significant amount of mass. So, it's not going to be easy going in the other direction, in fact, expect it to be harder. What hurts the turkey more, eating all the feed to become huge or getting trimmed on Thanksgiving?

So I left work thinking about dinner. Now, you have to realize something about this dinner. It is not the dinner you are used to. It is heavy on the vegetables and salad, 3 servings equalling about 1/2 cup each serving. You get 6-7 oz. of very lean meat or fish. You get one piece of fruit. It is not that much. But after 16 heaping ounces of diet shake since 7AM, it looks and tastes mighty satisfying. Take small bites, chew it a lot, get as much satisfaction as you can out of it...you won't get another one until tomorrow night.

I should say this about myself. I am a creature of habit. This worked greatly to my advantage on this diet. One of the things that really bothers people on this diet is the lack of variety. I could, in all seriousness, eat the same 3 meals every day for weeks on end. In fact, I do right now. My breakfast, lunch and evening snack today (Monday thru Friday) are almost the same exact thing every day. So I took the same approach to the diet dinner meal. I wanted easy. I didn't want to even think about it. My evening meal was one can of spinach (I actually had this tonight!), one can of tuna mixed in the spinach, and an apple. To spice things up, I put tobasco sauce in the spinach/tuna mix. I love hot stuff and tobasco has zero calories. One item of note here...I was NOT measuring my meat at that time. When I looked at the can of tuna, I misread the amount of tuna because of the servings. Three weeks later I would find out that I undercut myself by 1.5 ounces of meat every night. Measure your food to make sure you are getting the right amount.

I went out for my first bit of exercise that night. I walked 2.6 miles. It took 45 minutes. I wasn't setting any records here, but I did sweat on that hot July night. Exercise is critical. It is so critical that I am giving it it's own blog entry.

When I was done I took my shower and went to watch a little TV. At 9PM, I had my snack. A snack! Wow. What diet includes snacks? This is luxury.

"Pfsllllllppppppppp."

Day one was over.

Next: YES you have to exercise.