Here's The Skinny...

Skinny:
-adj; very lean or thin, narrow or slender
-noun; accurate information, facts; news

Wordplay is fun, isn't it?

As I'm writing this, I realize that someone along the way may not know what kind of changes I've gone through over the last year or so. In November/January of 2009/10, I weighed 315 pounds. I had just graduated from the University of Georgia, or so I thought (but that's a different story), and had too much free time on my hands. So I did what nearly any red-blooded American college student living in Athens would do: I drank way too much. It almost became a nightly occurrance and at a point, didn't even require other people to be around. I'd start drinking, and if other people came along then I'd hang out with them...if not, I'd drink by myself. It was a pretty dark place with more factors than I'll get in to right now, but suffice it to say, it was ugly.

And, as anyone who's done their fair share of drinking knows, when you drink late at night, you get hungry. So I'd eat at 2:30, 3:00 in the morning and go to bed...the easiest combination to gain weight extremely quickly.

So, February rolls around and I go to live back at home where my mom surprised me with an idea. She had just received a book called the "Belly Fat Cure" by Jorge Cruise and wanted me to join her in trying out the diet guidelined by Mr. Cruise in his book. He stressed what was, essentially, a sugarless diet, as well as as low-carb as possible. That was it. There was no counting calories, no deciphering fat content. Just stop eating sugar. So I decided to give it a try, but in the back of my mind I was thinking that I'd do it for a week or so and just give up. You know, the usual outcome of diets that restrict rather than encourage.

To tack on the this newfangled diet, I decided that I needed a life change as well. I was in the midst of planning a trip to Las Vegas with some of my best friends. So, I told myself that I'd stop drinking until the Vegas trip, just to prove to myself that I could.

I'm sure that most of you are thinking that this was too much to take on all at once, especially being a "cold-turkey" quitter of borderline alcoholism, but in all honesty, it wasn't too difficult to stay on board. And the first month's results were pretty astounding...but I'll get in to that next time.

-HW