I’ve been reading Ed Levine’s Serious Diet posts (as part of the excellent Serious Eats blog) since I started on my path to getting fit. With a sedentary lifestyle and a job that requires me to sit at a desk and type for hours at a time, I have a difficult time with getting enough exercise. Since I’m out so much I also tend to have to eat out a lot, or have to whip things together quickly when I’m home, so I have a difficult time eating right too. Compared to most people, I have an uphill battle. Thankfully, I have to lose so much weight that cutting calories and finding ways to increase mobility is an easy target. My nutrition and exercise were so bad prior to my new habits that it would have been difficult to do any less to get healthy.

Now consider this blogger for a bit of contrast. Ed Levine eats for a living. Well, technically he writes for a living, but he has to try out all sorts of different rich and calorie-packed foods and then write about them. Sure, it sounds like a dream job, but I imagine he has a harder time losing weight than nearly anyone on the whole damn planet.

For the past 38 weeks Levine has been posting updates every Friday morning on his progress for the past week. As diet and exercise blogs go, it’s not as filled with tips and tricks that you can use as some others (that I’ll mention here soon) but it’s a good consistently updated journal of one man’s diet, and the comments from other serious eaters are also usually excellent and positive.

I plan to follow Levine’s lead and write weekly updates starting this weekend just to keep a running commentary of my progress, pitfalls I’ve befallen, and other extenuating circumstances each week. The week seems like a good unit of time for measuring progress.