Welcome to my attempt at doing the South Beach Diet as a vegan!!

I don't have the book, but I've read bits of it, and have the updated Foods list. Plus, I've read a bunch of stuff on the web. That's good enough for me. The rule is that you eat 3 meals a day plus two snacks, and you get a dessert. The catch: the items must come from a very narrow list of "approved foods" for the first two weeks of the diet, a period called "Phase I."

Supposedly, you lose 8-13 pounds during Phase I, at which point you get to move to the more generous Phase II. Sounds like bullshit to me,frankly--five pounds a week means you need a caloric DEFICIT of about 17,500 calories in seven days (1 pounds = 3,500 calories). Normally, I eat about 14,000 calories a week (usually a bit less) and just maintain. So if I eat literally nothing, AND exercise off an additional 500 calories (5 miles of a slow run) a day, I should lose 5 pounds in a week.

But, hey, I'm willing to try to bend the laws of thermodynamics if the rest of the country is. And I can suffer through anything for two weeks.

Oh, so the other thing is, this is a meat-n-eggs-heavy diet. And I'm vegan. This means I'll have to be a bit creative. And probably a little bit of a cheater. (I'm kind of a lousy vegan, but well-intentioned.)

I spent today eating up all the verbotten carbs on the list that are hanging around my apartment: down my gullet went all my popcorn, and my mexican hot chocolate, and my frozen fruit bars, and my left-over pasta... Probably, I should down the three beers left in the fridge, too. Fun! They will be way too tempting later in the week once I start getting desperate. Which I'm sure I will get.

So I will weigh myself tomorrow morning, again one week into the diet, and again two weeks in. I will report what I'm eating, how much I'm exercising, etc.

Here are my goals:

--Get down to 120 pounds.
--Get rid of my bloated disgusting Budda-like stomach
--Feel better

FYI, here is a board that describes what is allowed at the different phases, and other things about the diet.