Step One of my Journey to be Less of a Dad: Nutrisystem

I don’t really know how it happened, but in the last year or so I have gained about 13 pounds. That’s me in the blue shirt: you can see I’m well on my way to becoming the Buddha.

Here’s the rub: I eat reasonably healthy and I hit the gym 2-3 times weekly, often more. Yeah, I’m fairly sedentary otherwise but I don’t feel like I have any horrible habits.

Well, except I know my downfall, and I can be candid about it: late night snacks. If I’m really honest, I know it’s late night boredom mixed with a teaspoon of loneliness about being by myself (even when the kids are with me and have gone to bed), but however you slice it, there’s more of me than I’d like.

Sure I’ve resolved to lose weight, and continue to have a good rhythm at the gym. Heck, I’m the mayor of my gym on FourSquare. But that isn’t helping me lose weight, because it’s not the exercise piece that’s a problem, it’s the eating piece.

When the opportunity arose to work with the NutriSystem team and become a Nutrisystem blogger, I rather jumped at it. They say that typical weight loss on the program is 1-2 pounds/week and that men lose faster than women. Further, add in the fact that I go to the gym and work out enthusiastically (this morning it was 7 1/2-miles on the Expresso exercise bike on a “challenging” course) and that four months that they’re sponsoring me should translate into a weight loss of 20-25 pounds. Which would be phenomenal.

In fact, I’ve hovered around 250-255 since I got divorced five years ago. And I’d like to be somewhere closer to the 235 pound mark. Now? I weighed in at the beginning of this adventure at 267.5 pounds. Now before you envision me as roly-poly, I’m also 6’3″ so I have a lot of height to distribute the weight and I don’t feel like I look fat, per se, just heavier than I’d like. But imagining myself at 240 or less? Excellent. I just have to get there.

Today is my first day on the program and as far as I can tell so far, it’s really built around two core concepts: portion control and frequent small meals to keep my metabolism rockin’ along all day. For breakfast I had a “power shake” (their pouch + water + ice, whipped together in a blender, surprisingly good) and a microwaved cinnamon roll (which was also rather tasty). In the next five hours I’ll be eating a hard boiled egg, an apple, a bunch of carrots, and a “lunch bar”. Not a huge amount of calories, but frankly I don’t eat lots anyway.

Dinner will be the meal that I am a tiny bit leery about, however, as there are an awful lot of small boxes of foods they sent me — think MREs — and I fear that won’t be a gastronomic delight.

But I can’t imagine anything more worthwhile than getting slimmer and feeling healthier, both from the perspective of modeling healthy eating and behaviors for my children and for the fact that I’ll just be happier when it comes to those anxiety-provoking family moments like pulling off my shirt to soak up the sun at a beach with the kids.

Am I going to have moments when I gaze longingly at a fresh pizza or juicy burger? Oh yeah. But am I going to indulge? Not for this four month period and after that? Hopefully I’ll realize that a slice and some veggies or splitting the burger with someone else might just be what I should have been doing all along.

Wish me luck.

Oh, and that cool scale? Withings has been kind enough to supply me with one of their über-high-tech WS-30 wifi scales. It calculates weight, body mass index (BMI) and fat, automatically reporting it to their server online. Which means I’ll have a nice graph of my progress to share down the road.

Want to lose weight and get healthy on Nutrisystem? Join today by calling 888-853-4689 or by visiting Nutrisystem.com