One of my favorite places to eat around my workplace is a neat little place called Baja Fresh. It’s a texmex place that makes your orders from fresh ingredients (you can watch them preparing it, they’ll chop up a tomato then immediately put it on your food, etc.). Black bean burritos, nachos with grilled chicken, everything you can think of texmex is made fresh on the spot and it tastes wonderful.

Well, they’re evil. I’d like to think that I’m not completely ignorant regarding nutrition, but I used to think that, since everything was fresh and non-processed, it was really good for me, right? How can I possibly gain weight eating it? Lo and behold, I went to Baja Fresh’s website and looked up the nutritional information for my favorite Nachos, and sweet mother of crap it tops the scales at over 2000 calories! That’s more than I eat in a single day!

On hearing that, Melissa joked that I could probably eat more food, that was better for my weight, and cost less at Taco Bell — and even though she was joking, she’s right. Two soft tacos are 430 calories, according to their website. Hell, a chicken Gordita Supreme (sour cream, three cheeses) is only 290!

So now I’m left thinking how ironic this is: freshly-prepared, organic, chemical and preservative-free food at one place is bad for you, while friggin’ Taco Bell is better.

Whether this is progress or scale variance is up to the reader:

• 224.5 pounds
• 31.5% body fat
• Blood Pressure 145/82

The Red Robin Bleu Ribbon Burger I had last night (1250 calories) for Sam’s birthday dinner probably didn’t help :-) I think that exercise is around the corner because my blood pressure is getting worse, not better. Next week will probably be obvious (in terms of course of action to be taken).

Very very challenging day today (mentally), and I forgot my lunch, so I had enchaladas for lunch and some chocolate at 5pm. At least the enchaladas were completely obscured by vegetables, so hopefully I’m not slipping off the wagon too quickly.

Today was particularly difficult mentally, so I slipped when I got home: a sugary drink (Tang Sunny Delight), and two chocolate chip cookies (Melissa makes the best chocolate chip cookies from scratch so this one is easier to justify).  Probably put me over 2000 calories, so no weight loss today.  :-/

I think I see a trend here:

• 225.5 pounds
• 33% body fat
• Blood pressure 141/77

This is a 2.5 pound loss for the week, but a 2 percent increase in overall body fat percentage. I’m losing water (not necessarily a bad thing) but it also appears that I’m slowly losing muscle mass, which is a very bad thing.

I’m going to follow this road until I hit a plateau (or 8 weeks, whichever comes first), and then I’m going to start cross-training (for muscle mass) and running (for weight loss).