Ok so to remind you about how this project works, I’m eating a certain “bad food” until I drop 1kg and then I move on to the next bad food. First off was burgers, which I’ve been eating for 10 days now. I started at 78.2kg on Feb 4th and have now dropped down to 76.9kg as of Feb 13th. Here is the video playlist if you want to watch.

The burger phase has actually been a lot of fun. I’ve eaten at least one burger a day, two on many of the days. Since the logistics of getting a burger don’t pan out well for breakfast,  I’ve mostly been eating lunch as my first meal of the day. I haven’t really been hungry much before that, and actually not eating until late in the day made the burgers so much more enjoyable. I thought I’d get sick of burgers pretty quickly, but I could probably do another few days no problem. 

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It’s really been fun trying out a lot of new burger places in a short space of time. By eating burgers every day, each one is fresh in my mind, making it easy to compare all the offerings. My favorite burgers I had during this phase of the project:

1. Mateo burger: amazing gourmet burger, cool restaurant with great fries and excellent drink selection.
2. Blackbelly burger: another gourmet option, but not quite as good as Mateo. The fries are definitely not as good as the other places. Blackbelly is a fantastic restaurant for other foods too, so I’d highly recommend visiting both of these places.
3. Third place to Five Guys Bacon Cheeseburger. It was super tasty and flavorful at a reasonable price.
4. Tie fourth place to Chuburger, Larkburger and Smashburger.  Chuburger outshines Five Guys, Larkburger and Smashburger in terms of experience; it’s a super cool bar with great beer options (being part of the Oskar Blues family, that’s to be expected). Larkburger, although a chain, it’s a small local chain and the ingredients are super fresh. If I wanted to grab a quick take out, I’d go with Five Guys or Larkburger. But if I was going to hang out with some friends, I’d go with Chuburger for sure.
5. The Burger King extra long cheeseburger was not my favorite. It was the cheapest of the lot, but it was pretty bland and unsurprisingly did not taste that fresh. But in fairness to BK, I should probably try one of their more reputable flagship options. With so many other great burger places around, I would probably steer clear of chains like McDonald’s and BK though.
6. I should also note that some of the best burgers were the ones I made at home. You have full control of all ingredients so the calorie count is probably most accurate. Plus it’s guaranteed fresh and it’s fun to experiment with different ways of making them.

The surprising things I’ve learned in the last 10 days:

• I’ve changed my dieting mindset completely. I used to think of dieting as “trying to get away with as few calories as possible”. Now my approach is the opposite; I want to eat as many calories as possible but still be in a slight deficit to lose weight. This means weight loss takes longer, but who is in a hurry if you’re having fun??? I feel this is much more sustainable for me, and losing at a slow rate of 1lb a week adds up pretty quickly.
• I’ve become much more aware of how many calories these high calorie foods have. I can now eyeball a burger and fairly accurately tell how many calories it has. Most good burgers are about 900 calories. If you’re not eating much else, you can eat two burgers a day and still be eating “low calorie”.
• Eating fries every day does not agree with me. Every time I ate fries, I noticed that I felt a lot worse than if I didn’t eat them. Plus, they seem to spike sodium levels a lot, leading to pretty high water retention. One of the days, I had a large plate of fries and the next day I was 4lbs heavier! Luckily it was just water weight and was gone by the end of the following day.
• Energy levels during workouts were actually pretty good. Much better than when I eat lower calories of heathy foods. It just goes to show that even if you are eating “good foods” you still need to make sure you’re getting enough calories if you want your workouts to be good.
• Since I usually approach everything with a high degree of discipline, it was really refreshing to feel like I was looking forward to my meal every day. Even though it actually took a lot of willpower to avoid eating other things, it was fun to always look at the menu options with the highest calories for a change. Even the highest calorie burger I ate was only 1300 calories, and trust me I could have eaten that as my only meal of the day.

Ok, well I’m ready for a change, now BRING ON THE ICE CREAM!!!!!
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