My "get back in shape" campaign has officially begun.  Today I started on the ediets plan.  My reason for choosing ediets was so that I would not have to buy special food from a specific company (i.e. Slim Fast), but I could pick and choose a combination of my personal favorite attributes of different diets.  Also, my girlfriend can do the diet with me but we can customize it to fit each of our needs without too much pain.  Ediets is great for people that just need to have a little focus put on making good choices.  The diet provides meal suggestions for every meal of the day based on your specific dietary needs.  In 10 minutes or so, I came up with my "plan" that takes into account that I have a desk job that also required business lunches, I don't have time to make a breakfast, and I am really hungry when I get done working.  In addition, my family background includes type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and basically a meat and potatoes kind of lifestyle.  I started my diet at 5' 10" and 183 pounds, although I do really have an athletic build so I am not totally fat yet.  My goal is to get down to 167-170 by mid May.  Before I started the diet, I started going to the gym the two weeks prior and doing cardio and lifting with the idea that if I can get a little momentum on the workout side, which I like to do, then I will see the benefit of following my diet plan.  Ediets is great for people who are very visual as it gives you a graph that charts your weight and weight loss goals.  It will also track your nutritional information if you enter it into the system.  I think I am just going to focus on trying to eat the same amount of calories they suggest for breakfast and lunch and then use their recipe suggestions to moderate my dinner.  For breakfast, I had a slim fast shake.  While this product is not specifically suggested  by ediets, it has similar nutritional info as the breakfast suggestion.  I had a lean, whey protein shake before my workout at lunch that again falls into the "similar nutritional info" guideline I set myself.  I like the convenience of the Slim Fast and the protein shakes.  If I don't seem to lose weight with this approach, then I may have to adopt a more strict policy toward following exactly what ediets suggests.  Dinner is the real test, I will let you know how that goes in my next entry.  My goal for this week is to get down to 180 pounds.