As part of my goal to be in the best shape of my life prior to our wedding, I’ve vowed to lose all my “Christmas baking” weight before we leave on April 10th.

Our Withings scale shows the damage and poor results so far:


I was very near my goal weight of 160 at the beginning of December, but a month of eating cookies and sweets pushed me to almost 170. This approached the outside limit of a “healthy” BMI.

So for the next 30 days, I’ll be following a diet modeled on the Tim Ferriss 4-Hour Body diet (aka “Slow Carb”). It is similar to Atkins and South Beach and encourages high protein intake.

The diet focuses on elimination of sugars and simple carbs that metabolize quickly. I made a chart to post on our fridge to show what we can and cannot eat:

This is a tough diet to follow, but if you stick with it, you’re pretty much guaranteed to lose weight, and more importantly, lose fat.

We’re combining the diet with the Insanity video fitness program so we don’t lose muscle mass along with the fat.

It will be interesting to see how this experiment goes, and what happens after 2 weeks of eating at all-inclusive resorts. Hopefully we’ll be able to maintain reasonable eating habits when subjected to all of that temptation.