THE COUNTER
Starting weight: 299
Last weigh-in: 287.8
Total pounds lost: 11.2
Pounds until 240: 47.8

What I ate today
Honestly, I really need to start tracking calories better.

Breakfast
2 Cups of Wheaties
1 ½ Cup of skim milk
Calories: 375
Fat: 0 grams

Snack
1 Handful (1 serving?) of what apparently are “Cheetos Puffs Cheese Flavored Snacks” (according to the website)
Calories: 160
Fat: 10 grams (I guess)

Lunch
1 Footlong Subway club,
1 Footlong Subway veggie
(yes, two feet of sandwiches, only four more for a party sub!)
Calories: 1,100
Fat: 18 grams

Dinner
2 Chicken breasts, 1 big, 1 small
Calories: 325 (a guess, since the bag of chicken says 120 calories per “piece”, yet one of these pieces was better than twice as big as the other. Somehow I don’t trust their rationalization on serving size.)
Fat: 4.5 grams

Total calories: 1,960 (according to my calculations. However, I don’t believe for a second that it was under 2,200)
Total fat: 32.5 (yikes)

Exercise: None. I am, for some reason, staying away from the gym right now. I don’t know why, but I do know that I will think about it and talk about it tomorrow.

So Monday was a bizarre day in the old Fortress.

As you can see, there were some odd eating choices. Will I rationalize them? Nope. But I will, however, point out that even with a handful of some sort of puffy Cheetos product and two footlong subs over the course of 15 minutes, I still managed to have a semi-acceptable calorie count.

I am fairly confident in those numbers, I suppose. Though I can’t be sure I only had one serving of the Cheetos product (but if not, it wasn’t much more), I used the nutritional value provided on the company’s Web site, as I did for Subway (I knew the count on the club, wasn’t sure on the veggie. By the way, it is less calories and fat if you get a double meat footlong club instead of a footlong club with a 6-inch veggie. Interesting, eh?)

But I think I should explain what happened on Monday, though it might not be that interesting.

The Cheetos came from my roommate, Ruben, a portly guy himself who, to be honest, eats like total shit at all times. He went shopping, as he is known to do, and came home precisely at the time that I was debating ordering a pizza. When I saw the Cheetos, which were not normal Cheetos but some sort of white-cheddar puffed out variation of Cheetos, I decided to go nuts. He offered, I accepted and grabbed a handful. Hey, why not warm myself up for that pizza?

But ultimately, I walked away from totally gorging and went to Subway instead, where I beefed up the normal club order with the veggie sub. That was sort of to reward myself for staying on the diet (sort of) and also to ensure that I would not want to order a pizza later on.

It worked, I’ll say. And I am proud to have salvaged a potentially damaging situation.

Now, why was I about to order a pizza? No, it wasn’t some irresistible craving, and it wasn’t a total breakdown of my self-concocted system. It was actually a give-and-take with myself, and a little bit of frustration at the limitations I’ve currently set in place.