Week 13 — Finish Line In Sight

Just two weeks to go in this project, and I have mixed feelings...on many levels. I'll explain. Today, I had a Valentine's Day lunch with my lovely wife at a local restaurant. I semi-splurged, with half a chicken salad sandwich, lentil soup and Italian bread with olive oil. I topped it off with a mini Hershey's chocolate. Not a big deal, right? Probably not...but I'm so zeroed in on my goal that I'm a bit confounded because I don't have nutritional numbers from the meal to enter into my spreadsheet (I probably don't want to see them anyway)! Eh, one stinking meal isn't going to destroy all the work I've done, but that's where my head is at right now. Other conflicting feelings I have relate to wanting to loosen my diet when this is all over, but at the same time I don't want to dismiss the many months of hard work and obliterate my abs right after I get them chiseled! Add to that the desire to put a little weight back on (I look muscular in the photos, but with clothes on I'm actually pretty skinny), and you can see I'm all over the place mentally.

With all that said, I'm really happy I've done this. It has taught me not only how my body reacts to specific diet and exercise plans, but that, with discipline and focus, anything can be accomplished. It has also provided a nice distraction from my "not being able to run" woes.

This past week — the first in which I've dutifully tracked every bit of nutritional information of everything I've shoved into my mouth — has been interesting.There have been days where I think I'm really getting sharp, and days where my definition seems to blur. As mentioned in a previous post, I also came to realize that my sodium intake was too low. The last two days, I've bumped that up nearly two-fold.

In case you're having trouble sleeping, here are my average daily nutritional stats from the previous week:

Calories: 1878
Protein: 117g (26.6%)
Carbs: 276g (63.8%)
Fat: 41g (9.5%)
Sodium: 662mg

I'm not going to post photos next week, but will wait until the "reveal" on my birthday (Feb. 28th). I know, you're going to lose sleep because you'll miss a week of seeing my shirtless (pasty) body in all of it's glory [insert heavy, self-deprecating sarcasm].

And with that ringing endorsement, here are this week's photos: