I made a silly decision to start my slow carb diet the week of Pride. But I was tired of putting it off for this reason or that. Family in town, traveling, still having to live in hotels, etc etc.

I knew that this wasn’t going to end any time soon and that putting off this experiment would do me no good. Even if it meant I couldn’t enjoy the food and drinks of Sunday’s Pride Parade here in San Francisco.

This morning I woke up, went downstairs and did my weigh-in. Down twelve pound! Almost too good to be true so I did a scale reset and tried again. Twelve pounds, right there. Wow. Here’s how I did it.

Last week, I went to the grocery store and purchased a weeks worth of food, slow carb food. If you don’t know, here is how the diet works.

There are three things you have to eat at every meal. You can mix this up a bit with spices and different ingredients here and there. I recommend you buy the book. You do this for every meal, six days a week. On your seventh day, your cheat day, you eat whatever you want and as much of it as you want (don’t go too crazy).

1. A serving of beans (canned beans of various varieties)
2. A serving of vegetables
3. A serving of a protein (eggs, fish, chicken, etc)

Things you don’t eat?

1. As with most carb-conscious diets, stay away from white foods (with an exclusion or two). Not even whole grains like wheat or brown rice.
2. Stay away from any milk product (soy milk, almond milk, etc included)
3. Absolutely no fruit.

This is the gist of my grocery list.

• 2 cans organic black beans
• 2 cans organic pinto beans
• 2 cans organic kidney beans
• 1 can organic garbanzo beans
• 1 stick of butter (allowed in small amounts, I use Plugrá butter)
• organic salsa
• organic, free-range eggs
• 1 carton of egg beaters
• 2 heads of broccoli
• 2 bunches of asparagus
• 1 bag of spinach
• 1 large onion
• 1 carton of mushrooms
• 2 organic avocados
• 6 frozen salmon filets
• 6 cans of tuna
• vegan cheese
• spices

The total is (rough estimate) around $53 which breaks down to $9.33 a day or $3.11 per meal ! That is incredibly cheap, especially since before this diet I was known to hit up sushi joints for dinner on a much-too-regular basis.

On Saturday I was supposed to go crazy, eat whatever I want, drink whatever I want, get rid of all the urges through the week and also spin my metabolism a bit. Unfortunately I failed! Well sort of. I sure didn’t eat the ice cream or donuts or any other luxuriously delicious foods I had been craving for the week. I did have some potatoes at breakfast, an English muffin and liquor. Other than that, I kept the diet.

In the end, after just over a week, I am down twelve pounds. Now, I definitely don’t see this happening every week, I’d be a stick within months. However, if I can maintain a downward trend of around six pounds a week, I’ll be more than happy, and I’ll settle for three.

So for the next few months, I’ll be sticking to the diet just to see where it goes. Here’s hoping it continues until I’m back to where I was a few years ago, or even better. Once we get our house back together, my personal training sessions will pick back up, speeding this up a bit even more, though weight loss will slow as muscle builds up.