Slow Carb Day 1

Last month, some of my friends started the Slow Carb diet and really enjoyed it. It's basically a modified paleo diet: no dairy, fruit, or carbs. It sounded terrible to this particular cheese-bread-and-banana-lover, but they lost a lot of weight and felt healthier, so my boyfriend and I decided to give it a try, too. We He invested in a fancy scale that measures BMI, fat %, muscle %, water %, etc, and I set up a new Excel document so we can track the numbers (nerd alert!). One thing I've already learned: weigh yourself in the morning! I lost 4.5 pounds between last night and this morning.

We just finished our first meal on the diet: a breakfast of egg whites, spinach, black beans, and salsa. It was more eggs than I'm used to eating early in the morning (1 1/8 cup of liquid egg whites!), and it's definitely filling. We get a cheat day on Saturdays, so went spent yesterday eating whatever we wanted to prepare. This included dim sum, Moe's (which is actually okay on the diet, provided you forgo the rice, cheese, chips, and sour cream), and King of Pops. One of the suggestions for the diet is that you take a picture of everything you eat. The idea is that if you are too embarrassed to post the picture where others can see it - and mock you for not sticking to your diet - then you probably shouldn't put it in your body. I've been using Foodspotting for a while now as just a way to keep track of foods that I like, so if you're at all interested in seeing what I'm eating you can follow me there.

The creator of the diet claims that you can lose 20 pounds in 30 days without exercising. I'm curious to see if that's true (my friends didn't lose nearly that much), but I'll also be continuing with my walking/running training with my Nike+ app. I just recently finished my first half-marathon of the year and am contemplating doing the Women's Nike full marathon in San Fransisco later this year with Team in Training. My only hesitation would be the fundraising costs associated with it, but I feel like I have a good support system in place and have gotten to the point in my training where I can take it to the next level. I was really proud of my performance in the Publix Georgia half. I beat six of my records (at least according to Nike+): 1 mile, 1k, 5k, 10k, half-marathon, and distance.