Jan 28 – Woke up super early. My shoulder has been in pain the last couple of days, but today is the worst by far. I think I pinched something or tweaked something. I don’t know, but it isn’t fun. Just like most things in my life, being in pain affects my eating. I used up almost all of my calories today, but that’s okay, I’m still trending towards banking around 300 – 500 per day.

Jan 29 – Another 5 AM wake-up, but thankfully, I was asleep by 10:30 PM, so I got more than I have been getting. My shoulder is still in a huge amount of pain. I’m not sure what is up with it and I’m getting tired of it hurting. I ate a bag of cheese curds today and used up over 600 calories. It filled me up pretty well, but I can’t really call it a meal.

Jan 30 – As I finish out this first month, I think about all of the people that have already given up on their New Year’s resolutions and how easy it would be for me to give up on this challenge. Tracking food and portions is boring. Remembering to write and vlog can be difficult. Between the company I co-founded, our puppy and spending time with my wife and family, I am a busy person. Do I want to be concerned with everything I eat for a year? Then I look at the scale and see some progress in the right direction. I looked up what the various tools say is the weight of a person of my height and age to match the calories I’ve given myself with a near sedentary lifestyle, and it is someone around 250 to 260 pounds, or around 25 pounds lighter than I am now. I haven’t been in the 250’s for a very long time and the idea that I could, through this challenge get to that point is super exciting to me. But this morning has been rough. My shoulder still hurts, I didn’t get much more than five hours of sleep, and I have a busy day to get through. My willpower is low, and I need caloric energy to make it, so I’m making poor food choices to start my day. It might be the first time that I go over my calories in a day and that feels like a setback. Mixed feelings today.

I didn’t go over my calories! I had less than half an apple’s worth remaining, but I stayed under. I am also over 7 days worth of banked calories at this point. I’m super pumped. I had a day where I went a bit crazy with food, but I stopped just short of my limit. That took a ton of willpower.

Jan 31 – Woke up this morning after almost eight hours of sleep. Amazing how refreshing eight hours is after consistently getting less than six. I am so focused on work stuff this morning, so I’m not really hungry. I’ll probably only end up having lunch and dinner. This afternoon, I go to my mom’s to help her with some tech stuff and to visit. I didn’t eat breakfast, and by the time I realized I was hungry, it was time to help my mom with tech stuff. We ended up going out for dinner at six in the evening, so I didn’t eat from around ten the previous night until six in the evening, so that’s a 20 hour fast I wasn’t planning for. It all worked out though because I got to have a bacon cheeseburger with some amazing french fries. I can’t complain too much.

Feb 1 – I am down again, only 1.2 pounds, but that means I lost 13 whole pounds in January. I have more than 7 and a half days of calories banked at my maximum daily usage. I used, on average 2062 calories per day during the month. If I were to need to burn my banked calories at that rate, I’d have around ten days worth. My lowest calorie usage day was January 1st, and my highest was January 30th. I only ate breakfast thirteen times during the month. I skipped lunch six times, never missed dinner and only had three days with no snacks. I used a total of 63,927 calories over the course of January. According to MyFitnessPal, I only went over 300 grams of carbohydrates eight days over the month. This is pretty huge for me as I’d estimate that I would probably go over 300 grams of carbs twenty to twenty-five days a month before I started this challenge. One of the things I know I need to do is continue to work on cutting back on my carbohydrate intake, especially sugar. Another stat from MyFitnessPal is that I only met my 137-gram protein marker two days out of thirty-one. That’s not great.

I ended up going to bed pretty early as I had a headache and was super tired. It was needed.