I’ve tried various methods throughout my life in an attempt to lose weight. Most of them worked and would have continued to work had I stuck with them. There’s just one problem… I love food. Good food. Not fast food (although Taco Bell is pretty tasty), but good food.

About 5 years ago, I really got into cooking and starting learning everything I could about it. I started experimenting with different types of food, not just American, and learned that there’s great food in every culture. I cook using whole base ingredients and do all of my own prep work. I use a lot of produce, meat, and other natural ingredients from scratch. It takes more time to cook this way, but I enjoy it and the food tastes better.

Anyway, I love food so much that I developed a real obsession with it, always looking forward to the next meal and wondering what weird concoction that I could try. I ate at a lot of nice restaurants and loved every minute of it.

So anyway, I accept the fact that I love food and nothing’s going to change that. The problem is, I’m not really active enough to eat all this good, rich food without getting fat and unhealthy. Somethings gotta give.

I’ve been overweight (actually obese according to my BMI score) for a long time, so I’m used to hearing quips from people about being fat. To be honest, it doesn’t really bother me that much, but still, no one likes to hear things like that. The real catalyst for me to do something came while I was playing racquetball. I’ve been playing for 6 years and used to play for 2 hours straight, but after I played one twenty minute game, I was spent. I couldn’t breath. It was pitiful. At that moment, I knew I had to change.

It’s not that I don’t get any exercise. I play in a racquetball league twice a week and also walk my dogs a few days a week. But, my food intake was too much for even this amount of exercise to combat.

I had read some things about keeping a food log and how it was a very successful tool in the weight loss process. So I used my google-fu skills and found MyFoodDiary.com. For $9 a month, I use their site to track everything I eat. They have a huge database of food, so it’s really not that time consuming. To boil it down to the very basics, it’s a calorie counting system that’s easy to use.

I started using their site January 31, 2010 and I weighed 213 pounds. Now, 2 months later, I’m 193 pounds, a loss of 20 pounds. I still have a long way to go to meet my goal weight of 170 pounds, but this method works for me. I’m a nerd and numbers appeal to me, so doing the math of weight loss makes every food and exercise decision black and white.

Why am I sharing this? Partly as self-therapy to help me do it, and partly to help others who may be trying to do the same thing. I’ll be posting about my discoveries regarding food, recipes, exercise and more. I hope you get something out of it.