This week I have finally made a commitment to eating healthier. My approach is a little different as I still intend to eat the kinds of foods I have always enjoyed. I am not on a gimmicky diet, and I sure as hell am not going vegan, but I am making better choices, and getting creative.

It’s only been a day and a half since implementing this change, but I already feel more energy, and the food I’ve been eating is pretty frikken good. I’ve decided to track my progress here on my blog, and share any of the recipes I come up with during this transition.

First, let me share a little health history with you.

Back when I worked 40 hours a week at Best Buy, I was on my feet all day, walking all over the place, lifting a lot of home entertainment equipment and what not. I was a lean 160lbs and didn’t realize how good of shape I was actually in.

Fast forward 5 years of sitting on my ass in front of a computer all day and not lifting anything heavier than a pen for most of the day and you find a man who’s metabolism has ground to a halt and finds himself with an unwanted 50lb spare tire.

I tried going to the gym on a regular basis, and even succeeded for almost a year, but with a family of 4 and a kid in school that ended up conflicting too much with my work and meal schedule. Not to mention, the gut didn’t want to go away at all.

I’ve done plenty of reading here and there on ways to get rid of unwanted fat and get back to being healthy and energetic, but most of the recommendations involved a drastic diet change and quite frankly, I wasn’t willing to give up the foods I enjoy.

Last week, I was reading again and stumbled across mealsmatter.com. My wife had recently brought home one of them fad diets and I was mostly curious to look up what a balanced nutritional diet looked like compared to this magical fat burning diet.

Mealsmatter.com is a pretty nice community of nutrition conscious people, and they have a pretty big database of recipes and such, but they also have advice on how to improve your health through better eating. As I read through their recommendations, the concept of calorie counting clicked with me for the first time (I knew too many calories were bad, but didn’t realize how many EXTRAS there are in most food). I decided to use the food journal they have available on their site just to get an idea of what I was putting into my body, and what I was lacking.

After a week, I found I was packing in at LEAST 2500 calories a day (with the help of the calorie search on calorieking.com)… often getting up to 3500+. Considering I don’t get much physical exercise these days, it’s pretty amazing I’m not morbidly obese right now.

And yet, even knowing this, I still refuse to give up the food I enjoy… so I wasn’t sure how to tackle the situation.

Friday night, we went to the mall and ended up in Borders looking to get some fiction books and such just for entertainment purposes. On the best sellers rack, a little yellow book caught my eye, so I picked it up. The book was titled “Eat This, Not That” and the premise was making smart choices and substituting certain foods for other foods that are comparable in flavor, but less healthy.

The book is a pretty cool reference for people who eat out a lot. You can flip to any restaurant and get 3 or 4 reccomendations of things on the menu that won’t bomb your gut too bad, and a list of things that probably shouldn’t even be called food.

The book also touched on a lot of suggestions that mealsmatter.com had, and listed a bunch of foods you should try and eat every day. It was then that the gears started rolling in my mind.

I’ve always been a pretty good cook. I have this uncanny ability to eat any food, then go home and recreate the flavor with household ingredients. How hard could it be to use healthy, low-calorie/low-sodium ingredients to re-invent the same foods I enjoy?

And so yesterday it began…. We went to the grocery store, looked at the nutrition facts on all the foods we normally buy, then looked for ‘low fat’, ‘all natural’ and ‘no salt added’ variations of these items. It took some time looking through all the food, but the pattern I saw was if you could get anything that’s ‘all natural’ or ‘no salt added’, you were cutting calorie levels in half or more.

We bought a bunch of pork and beef, but went for leaner sirloin and fillet cuts rather than fatty ribeyes and such. Leaner meat has more nutrition per oz, and fewer calories and fats, but it does cost a bit more. Of course, to keep on track, we will only be eating 6oz portions instead of the massive slabs we used to eat, so we probably ended up spending less money that way.

So now it’s a day later… and I made my first attempt at healthier cooking by coming up with an alternative recipe for spaghetti sauce last night, and whipped off a damn tasty sandwich condiment today.

I can’t help but notice the effects already, and I’m feeling more motivated than ever to forge on!

Keep an eye on the ‘lifestyle’ and ‘recipe’ sections here and I’ll keep dumping the things I come up with.