The Bet

The Bet : My 278-lb, 5'11" boyfriend Justin has entered into an office contest to see who can lose the most weight by June 28th.

The Prize : $700.00, cash

My Role : Since Justin didn't have my benefit of being raised with typical suburbanite health-obsessed parents, he's given it to me to try to create a diet from scratch. Keep in mind, I have no formal training, am pretty chunky myself, and have drawn most of my nutritional knowledge from this NY magazine article.

The Plan : Every week, I'm going to create a menu of high-protein, low-fat and low-calorie meals. I'll make a grocery list for 7 breakfasts, lunches and dinners and head down to the Fairway Market on my block. I'll then post what we ACTUALLY got from the market (since it can be touch-and-go getting everything on the list). During the week, I'll post the recipes, nutritional content (as well as I can hamfistedly calculate it with the help of my friend Calorieking) and the overall tastiness of the results. I'll also be tracking our weight-loss progress to see if we're getting anywhere.

The bigger picture : It's common knowledge that, to lose weight, you should "put down the fork, fatass!". However, in a society that sells 'monster thickburgers' and advertises KFC as a "healthy option", it's not as easy as it sounds to know what to eat. A Google search for "low calorie meals" brings up a lot of single-dish suggestions (hey, that's not a meal and I don't care who you are) with no nutritional info attached to back up the claim. We're going to try, without doing any branded diet (Atkins, South Beach, the Lemonade Diet, the Cabbage Soup Diet...ugh) to lose weight using common sense and some online tools. By logging the recipes and nutritional info, I'm hoping that anyone can use this as a guide to try their own personal diet exploration.