It's getting difficult. I swear, my neighbors in this building all know I'm on a crash diet and have chosen this week to cook incredibly aromatic dinners, all of them. The Italian family, the Mexican lady, and the Thai couple. It's fucking agony just getting to my apartment door from the street.

Three days of < 700 calories/day. I was hopeful I could substitute a lean boneless pork chop for one of the protein shakes but no go. I wanted to because I get sick of constant sweet things, and in this case it's not even really sweet, just fairly horrible artificial flavors (strawberry, vanilla, chocolate). I make do with a cup of chicken bouillon, which at least I'm allowed to drink to keep myself sane, and a large cup of peppermint tea with Splenda (also allowed).

Today I had to attend a talk a friend was giving, in a professional setting. Because it was a bunch of techies, the org hosting the talk laid out an incredibly nice spread to entice all all to come, and then hosted a trip to the bar afterwards. The guy I know at the sponsoring company and I have a joke - he runs the colo I built my last company's infrastructure in, and they had an executive meeting room at the facility for sales meetings and the like. We spent a lot of late nights there, and I discovered that they had two 5-lb jars of Jelly Belly jelly beans on the conference table. I must have eaten at least 3 lbs of them over the weeks we worked there late. When they redid the facility, and I visited, he walked into our cage when I was there, put down a motion-activated Jelly Belly dispenser (full of beans) and walked out without saying a word. So I got to the talk and on the table, among all the various cold cuts, beer, fruit, veg, raw bar - was a 5-lb jar of Jelly Bellies. Which he picked up, came over and handed me.

I managed to laugh the whole thing off. But fuck me, it was hard.

I had one 1-inch diameter slice of salami, and 1 baby carrot, to prove to myself I could taste it and not keep eating. The rest of the evening I drank water, and I didn't go to the bar.

This is seriously going to be the hardest thing I've ever done.

Weight: 329.5