The Disney Groom: The Great Lifestyle Change

Full Disclosure: This is a backdated post. I wrote it after the blog was created, but have written it in the style of an in-progress blog so that anyone reading from the beginning will get a more sensible narrative than time-jumping like Sawyer, Jin, Juliet, Miles, and Daniel through our wedding planning.

As it turns out, our decision to wait 18 months to get married has more benefits than just the financial ones. Girl Scout Fiancée and I have been talking it over, and neither of us is happy with our weight right now. Neither of us wants to be this size when we get married, because we want to be able to look back on this point in our lives and be totally happy with how things were. Of course, I want Girl Scout Fiancée to feel like a Disney Princess at our wedding and on our honeymoon, and if I'm going to look a little more like Prince Charming and a little less like the humans from Wall-E, I'm going to have to put a lot of hard work into it. So, with that said, I'm committing myself to a weight loss goal of losing 120 lbs. before our wedding, which is 15 months from now. That will put me at about 160 (I am at 283 right now) and would be close to my weight when I graduated from high school. It's going to be tough, but it will be worth it.

More or less the opposite of what we want our honeymoon to look like.

Of course, losing not quite 1/2 my body weight isn't going to be easy, but I've got a plan. First, I'm going to use an app to track my calorie intake. A while back I signed up for the MyFitnessPal app on my iPhone (yes, I live in Seattle and have an iPhone, try not to faint from shock) and have been absolutely awful about actually using it. So, today, I weighed myself and set the app's settings to calculate a weight loss rate of 2 lbs. per week. I'll be counting calories and inputting everything I eat, and to help me stick to the plan (and keep me from going over my calorie budget each day), Girl Scout Fiancée and I are going to have a competition. She's also going to be doing something similar with her own app, and each day that one of us stays under his or her calorie count, that person gets 1 point. At the end of the month, the person with the fewest points for the month has to do some chore for the next month. We've chosen laundry as our first chore, because we both hate it.

In a few weeks I plan to start exercising, but for now I want to get my body accustomed to the reduced calorie intake. There's nothing wrong with easing into a big lifestyle change like this, and I refuse to allow myself to be completely miserable. I want to be happy about losing weight, not resentful. Fortunately, I've got a pretty awesome partner in crime for this one, and we're going to be supporting each other throughout the process.

Here are a few relatively current pictures to show you our starting points.