I found my old food journals. Great googly moogly! They are SO bad!

The first ones don't show the year, but I'm pretty sure they were from college in the late 80's. I must have been about 20 years old. Obviously, my brain hadn't fully developed yet. I lived on Malt-o-Meal, watermelon, and Weight Watchers frozen dinners. The calories were under 800 a day. Sometimes I didn't bother with food at all. This was around the height of the Starvation and Flab era, although not my lowest weight. I didn't start with the lunatic food journaling until my weight began creeping back up and I couldn't figure out why. (Again, with the lack of brain.)

In the second journal a few months later, my discipline had started to crack. The calories were still low, my weight was still low, but the food had become completely ridiculous. In that 4 day span, my diet consisted of - a chocolate malt, buttery rolls, cheeseburgers, french fries, Crunch bars, cheesecake, macaroni and hot dogs. Holy crap! 

In the third example, we fast forward a few years to the Clueless Vegetarian era. I had stopped eating meat and had started walking for exercise, which sounded healthy at the time. The only problem is that I was consuming no protein and enough junky processed carbs per day to feed a third world country. My weight soared and I was actually sporting jowls for awhile.

So, I definitely took the scenic stupid route to getting fit. I did everything wrong for a lot of years. I was on the right track when I found The Zone and Body for Life and started strength training, but I still struggled. It's only within the last couple of years that I really learned to relax, to eat like an athlete and not a dumb ass. Props to John Berardi and Precision Nutrition on that one! :-)