This morning I weighed in at 228.6 - a drop of 6 pounds from yesterday morning.  Why so much?  Is that typical?  When switching from a high carbohydrate diet to a low carbohydrate diet, you will frequently have a large drop in scale weight over the first few days due to the loss of water weight.  Carbohydrates cause your body to retain water, and in the absence of carbohydrates, your body releases the water weight.  The diet books and programs are counting on this large initial weight loss!  And actually, it's not such a bad thing from a motivation standpoint - instant results will encourage you to keep going.  But at this point, you're not in fat burning mode just yet.

What most diet programs won't tell you is what to do when you get stuck.  As we go along, you'll see how I deal with plateaus.  Basically, your body adapts to its conditions pretty quickly.  As soon as your progress grinds to a halt, you need to change up your routine - whether it is tweaking your intake or your exercise, or both.

Yesterday, my size 36 pants and size 16.5/34-35 shirt were screaming!  Today, there's some room to breathe.  I am not an advocate of using scale weight for measuring progress.  As you can see, you may actually be losing water or burning muscle tissue, both of which would show up as lost scale weight.  But lean muscle is your friend and will speed your fat loss efforts - which is why the last thing you want to do is sacrifice it.  At least if you are going to use scale weight, you need to do it under the exact same conditions every day - for me it is first thing in the morning, post-evacuation

I also workout in the morning, usually in a fasted state.  Like I said in an earlier post, there is a debate (with solid data on both sides of the argument) about whether it is appropriate to workout in a fasted state, so I do what feels right for me.  Today's workout included all bodyweight exercises for a total of 27 minutes.

• 5 minutes of warmup and dynamic stretching
• 4 minutes of burpees
• 2 minutes recovery
• 4 minutes of box jumps
• 2 minutes recovery
• 4 minutes of dips
• 2 minutes recovery
• 4 minutes of chin ups

I'll check in later with the day's nutrition update.