Breakfast: veggie-scrambled egg (finally polished off the beets. Yeah)

Lunch: Daikon (steamed in remaining turkey stock), cucumber, canned salmon, rice and some bread.

Dinner: Hmmm... Had dinner with a coworker at a restaurant. A Mexican restaurant. I know, what am I doing eating Mexican on PCP, eh? Got a burrito with chicken, rice, and salsa (no sour cream, no guac, no beans, no cheese) and a corn on the cob (hold the butter, hold the cheese, hold the mayo [apparently people eat all three of these on corn by default!?]). The result looked PCP friendly and I figured I'd be ok--but I left feeling it just as much as one would normally expect from such a place. No more of that!

Breakfast: a winner. Rye-french toast, cold chopped "the big steam" veggies, cottage cheese on the single extra slice in my carb requirement.

Lunch: A very simple meal of bread, chicken, stringbeans, and zucchini.

Dinner: rice, chicken, steak, beets, acorn squash.

Also, I'm just loving the berries for the fruit snacks. They're so cheap and sweet here compared to Japan, I just bought every kind I could get--straw, blue, black, rasp, etc. and threw them all together. Yum!

yesterday's meals

Got home late (after badminton) so this is a day late.

Breakfast was whole-wheat pasta + cucumbers + mushrooms + a couple of tablespoons of cottage cheese & some of my milk portion. I subtracted the cottage cheese out of the milk by weight, if that really matters (I suspect not?). Anyway, it was yummy.

I have no memory of what I ate for lunch yesterday. I strongly suspect it was protein, carbs, and veggies.

For dinner we were back at Cha-ya (veggie Japanese restaurant in Berkeley). I was surprised that even in that environment it's quite hard to order PCP friendly food. Probably I should have again gotten the nabe and skipped the tofu. Instead I tried a veggie robata-yaki with a side of off-menu brown rice. Surprisingly, even though half the menu uses the word "genmai" (==brown rice), the waitress had no idea what it was. Anyway, the sticks came absolutely covered in thick sugary teriyaki sauce, which I wiped off as best I could.

Since the meal had zero protein, I pan-fried up my allocation of chicken after getting home.

Updated the graph

I hate to report this but...

I've now gained fat and lost muscle since starting PCP. Well, to some extent the scale must be wrong. If it's to be believed, I gained 298 grams of fat, lost 1.41 kg of muscle, and lost 1 kg of something else. I don't really find that muscle-loss plausible given the exercise. But it is what the scale says.

Something tells me this isn't the expected result. But hey, it's been a lot of food.

The Nutcase Who Got Me Into This

is barely half-way done and already looks absurdly ripped. Way to go Ren!

Apr 26

Dang. Forgot to snap lunch again.

Breakfast was scrambled eggs (w/turkey beet soup and jalapeños), bread, veggies from the remaining chicken soup, acorn squash, beets.

Lunch (unpictured) was more turkey breast (had a lot of this), rice, more of the veggie mix

Dinner was a sort of a messy salad--what can I say, I ran out of time. Lettuce, tomato, turkey, rice, turkey-beet soup, liquid from the chicken soup, acorn squash, jalapeños. Thought it would be terrible but it wasn't half bad. Definitely need to stock up on some PCP emergency canned and/or frozen rations.

Had tons of energy today. Felt like running around while I was stuck sitting in the office.

Breakfast: brussel sprouts, rice cooked in beet & turkey stock, fried eggs, milk

Lunch: (unpictured) Corn, tomato, turkey breast meat, leftover beet&turkey rice, sourdough rye bread

Dinner: Turkey meat, bread, lettuce, leftover rutabaga.

I steamed acorn squash and the rest of the beets as Patrick suggested. I've been using fruit-salad to the same effect. Indeed, why not chunked-steamed-veggie salad?

Sat Apr 24th

Breakfast: leftover rutabaga, eggs, veggies picked from leftover chicken soup, whole wheat pasta

Lunch: A little over 3 large turkey breast sandwiches w/lettuce, Jalapeños, dijon mustard, sourdough rye bread.

Dinner: more leftover chicken soup, with sourdough rye chunks + on the side.

Breakfast: boiled rutabaga, lentils as my carb (Patrick informs me this was an error, and lentils are to be avoided), eggs as usual.

Lunch: lesson learned--when dieting by weighing one's food, the scale is most sensitive to the amount of water in the food. A dry fluffy bread weighs almost nothing, and so it takes a *lot* of slices to make the gram count. The rest of the lunch is leftover dinner with some extra veggies (broccoli and cauliflower) thrown in

Dinner: Chicken soup-like dish made with radish, radish greens, broccoli, carrot, whole wheat pasta, and of course chicken. This was a winner, and the contrast of the small amount of (somewhat soggy) pasta vs. the bread at lunch couldn't have been greater. Definitely feeling the burn on all the exercises now. I can't wait to see what happens to my stats after a week of eating this sort of quantity of real food. Will my body use all that energy or build muscle with it?

Wow, that was too much food

... and to think I've left out the pics of two of the snacks.

Still, in defense of Michael Pollan, I suppose I could have and occasionally did eat this much pasta, pizza, ice-cream, fried-foods, etc. without so much trouble. This sort of food is just difficult to eat in these sorts of quantities (I suppose on account of all the fiber). Anyway, breakfast was fried-egg-on-rice, tomato and bell-pepper, milk

lunch: corn & celery, steak sandwiches w/dijon mustard

dinner: salmon cooked with mushroom & salsa, bread. A bit of a dangerous experiment with leftovers but it ended up tasting like bouillabaisse. Measuring weights after cooking was tricky but basically I fished out chunks of salmon and counted the rest as veggie.

Two of the snacks were berry mix, the other was a large orange.

Tonight I hope to do a better job of preparing the food as this was all a bit of a rush today. I went and bought just about every veggie in the store that I didn't recognize or don't know how to cook. As Patrick wrote, "We're living in the matrix." Indeed. For the record, as for rutabaga, you boil it.

Last meal of the uncontrolled diet.

Yogurt with banana for breakfast.

Mushroom / Kimchi / Bell-Pepper / Red-Onion / Omelet for lunch, with pita bread and grapes

bought and ate a banana while cycling around looking at apartments

I wanted to get rotisserie chicken for dinner, but Whole Foods didn't seem to have it (well, other than the whole chicken). So fried up a chicken-breast stir-fry with lots of Soy Sauce. Kept the rice and chicken portion at the largest-meal-of-the-day week-2 figures Patrick just sent us, mostly just to see how much it really was. Didn't bother to weigh the veggies which I'm sure were way over (would too much veggie actually be a problem?). Anyway, it was plenty of food and quite yummy. My whole body's sore today (from Badminton, PCP, and cycling), and the 8th day exercises were very difficult.

breakfast: yogurt with banana

lunch: 1 pear, 1 clementine, instant miso-soup.

Met my old school friend Chin for badminton & dinner. He took me to a great Vegetarian Japanese restaurant called "Chaya" in Berkeley. I ordered a mushroom vegetarian nabe (the picture is of the tofu version, but it's pretty much the same). Now technically, this being Japanese food, I guess I could have applied the "half" rule. But also technically I've never had vegetarian food in Japan, and the nabe (iron pot) cooking my wife makes is full of wonderful fatty meat (yum!). And I *never* stop at one bowl. So I wasn't going to feel guilty about a full bowl of cabbage and konyaku noodles soaked in kombu (kelp) soup!

Overall, a silly low # of calories and somehow I'm not hungry. Weird.

Breakfast was the last tortilla, 2 slices of turkey, half an avocado (under the turkey), milk, and a Clementine.

I forgot to take a pic of lunch, but it was the other two kebabs I cooked last night + 1 pita + carrots + celery. This turned out to be a good test of will as right before I was about to dig into it I ended up going out to lunch with a candidate and a coworker. I just had coffee, watched them eat huge meals, and finished the mostly veggie meal I'd made for myself at my desk afterward.

Dinner was a planned outing with coworkers at a Mexican joint called "Nick's Crispy Tacos". Getting 3 tacos was the recommendation (apparently they were quite "small"). Got one grilled fish taco, refused the cheese/guac/sour-cream/etc + ate a side of rice. So the waiter screws up and brings an extra taco for my coworker. Damn thing stared at me all dinner and I swear called my name at least once, but honestly I wasn't hungry.

Truth be told, for some reason I haven't been hungry lately at all. Dunno, something's happening--perhaps a combination of lots more exercise (the cycling and PCP), and entirely giving up sugar (which I started a few weeks before PCP)? I'm having fun cooking and so have eaten what I've made, but I feel like I could get by with far less.

Speaking of the exercises--personally, I feel the sit ups while I'm doing them (my fat gut's in the way, after all), but don't notice the rest yet. Yes, I know Patrick, I will.. I will.

food

Breakfast:

1. yogurt + sliced 1/2 of banana
2. half rye/egg/sliced-turkey/salsa sandwich

Lunch (thank you Whole Foods):

1. Quarter chicken (threw out the skin)
2. Mixed fresh veggies

+ 1 large navel orange I forgot to snap a pic of.
Dinner

1. 2 broiled Kebabs of steak, red and orange bell peppers, red onion, mushrooms
2. Grapes
3. Hummus
4. Gomoku rice which tasted terrible so I chucked it.

Did lots and lots of riding today, as I'm apartment hunting. Got my chin-up bar in the mail. Wish I'd had one of these years ago. So easy/tempting just to do some while waiting for a pot to boil or what-have-you.

Breakfast:

1. Cantelope
2. Milk

Snacked on a banana
Lunch:

1. Corn on the cob
2. two clementines

Dinner

1. 2 Turkey / avacado / salsa / tortilla wraps
2. grapes
3. carrot

Breakfast:

1. Skim Milk
2. Tomato-Chicken-Omlette
3. Celery stick
4. Pita

Lunch:

1. Kim-chi, Celery, Tabouli
2. Sweet Potato on onion/chicken/rice mix

Dinner:

1. Half cantelope
2. Half steamed corn cob
3. Dregs of Tabouli

My pre-dinner workout

I bought a new bicycle on day 1 here in SF so as to make a habit of cycling to work by bicycle. Going there, no problem. Coming back? Well, so far I made it up half the hill (then walked), made it by going around the hill and approaching from the back (it's less steep but twice the distance), and made it by zigzagging along the cross-streets. My goal: power straight up that sucker before I'm kicked out of my temporary pad (May 9).

Got a nifty new Omron scale, the day one photo is up, and here are the starting stats:
78.3 Kg
24.5% Fat
"10" Visceral Fat (on scale of 0-30)
BMI: 27.1
Muscle: 36.7% 
I noticed on my scale Visceral fat didn't have the "%" sign, and after looking through the docs realised that apparently it's only useful in relative terms (getting the number lower is good, but the scale can't really tell how much of it you have). なるほど.
My stats are significantly better than when Patrick tested me a few weeks back. A few factors at play here. #1, I wasn't looking forward to having my manboobs on the 'net (still don't like it, but now I can appreciate the wisdom in it), #2 I wasn't employed (I really overate when bored, which was a lot of the time, frankly), and #3 I've been very careful about eating since Ren showed me the sugar video, which is a very interesting, scary, and long video about the health effects of eating sugar (and/or HFC). I'm guessing he got the link from Patrick? Anyway, avoiding sugar (or just about any other ubiquitous but completely unnecessary ingredient, frankly), really makes you think about your food.
Not sure what to do about the week 1 diet, as I'm in a new country, completely jetlagged, cooking my own very different food for the first time, etc. etc. There really is no "normal" here for me to cut in half. Anyway, I'll try to eat small portions.
This task reminds me of an old boss of mine, who, when eating together at a restaurant, would pause after eating exactly half his food (and usually stop there). Once, I asked him if he didn't like it, and he said something like: nah, it's good. But I always stop halfway and ask myself, is this one of the best I've had? And if it's good but not really one of those fantastic meals I'll be remembering years from now, and I'm not still hungry, I stop. If it's going to cost me time in the gym later, the food needs to earn it.
Ok, enough blabbering.. Here are my day 1 meals:
breakfast (remember, because of jetlag, these labels mean nothing): leftover chicken+rice+hummus, whole wheat & corn tortillas, raspberries, Tabouli salad.
lunch: celery, carrots, parsley. Rice cooked with onions and chicken liver, tortillas,
dinner: steamed corn (half), more tabouli salad, steamed sweat potato, hard boiled egg, skim milk (half)

Here's where I get fit...

Hello fellow PCPers and other lurkers.
My name is Todd, and this is my peak condition project blog. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
I'm 37 years old, have lived in Japan for the last 12 years, and just moved to San Francisco 4 days ago. I didn't manage to stay in very good shape even with the relatively sane cuisine of Japan (beer & tonkatsu don't make one thin? You don't say!), so I figure that if I just continue as I have here in America it'll be a health disaster.
So here I am in SF, on my own (my three girls and wife are still back in Japan to finish up the school year). It's sink or swim time.
The guy on the upper right, who is supposed to be our inspiration, I don't actually know.. What I do know is he was 41 when he did his PCP, and by working hard and following the program he got from... well, go check out his last post yourself. Real people do this, some older and in not much better starting shape than me.
And my buddy Ren, who introduced me to this site and to Patrick, is, btw, kicking ass. Good to see.
I only hope I can do half as well as these guys.
more to come...