First week was a success! I'm down 5.6lbs. I have to lose 13lbs, and I needed to be down 3.5lbs by today, so I'm ahead of schedule. We actually started meal planning a week ahead and did the majority of our changes 7 days early, and I already drank a LOT of water before starting the DietBet, so I'm fairly certain that I got a bunch of my water weight out of the way before the first weigh-in even happened. I expected disappointment and frustration, or not to make my goal at all. I've tried quite a few times to lose weight (who hasn't), and that first week always feels like ~MAGIC!!~ as your body remembers what it's like to be hydrated, and then week 2 I usually find a bit disheartening. Through the magical powers of hydration, I think I'm avoiding most of that schlump. Yaaay.
My "diet" is the following: minimal processed foods, no dairy (I am mildly lactose intolerant), no takeout, no buying food on the way to work/at work/immediately after work (I work in an area with a LOT of unhealthy food changes within walking and easy driving distance). I don't really count calories, but I do plug most of my food into MyFitnessPal just to look at the calorie content and get a generalized idea of what my day should look like. MFP tells me to eat 1995 calories a day for 2lb/week weight loss, since that's the highest number of pounds per week they'll calculate for, and DietBet says to eat between 1645 and 1995 a day to make my goals, so I "allow" myself about 500 calories per meal and keep my snacks healthy. The reality is that my meals tend to come in under 500 because I round amounts up if I'm guessing at them for MFP; the reason I don't use the app religiously is because it's difficult to track food with it if it's all homemade and you don't have a food scale.
The most processed food I eat right now is a Kind breakfast bar, every day between 9am and 10am. I eat my real breakfast around 6am or 6:30am -- for the past 2 weeks, every day it's been 2 eggs, a serving of breakfast sausage, and a piece of fruit --, so my Kind bar keeps me from getting crabby before I eat lunch at 1pm. I tend to be most hungry mid-morning for some reason. I get snacky again at 5:30pm or so, and that's usually carrots and hummus. I'm making a loooot of chicken dishes, and a really great turkey meatloaf that lasts through the week.
I'm not really up in that artificial sweeteners gig, except for my first big glass of water in the morning. I have a big mason jar I drink out of at home, but for some reason I'm not very thirsty when I first wake up. If I get "bored" with how something tastes, I'll just ignore it for hours, and I wake up "bored" with how water tastes. Sometimes I end up not drinking any water until I get to work a few hours after waking up, and then I have to make up for feeling dehydrated once I get there. I got these little knock-off Crystal Light single serving packets to throw into my water in the morning, so I get my (fake) sugar hit right up front and that helps motivate me to drink as much as I need while I'm still half asleep and cranky. Gotta start right.
I'm not exercising yet. I'm wary of trying too much at once and then giving myself an anxiety freakout if I want to take one day to not exercise. I know myself and my hyper competitive nature, so that might be a Next Week thing once I'm really settled into my routine. I have an exercise bike in my living room, so ultimately I think I'll end up picking a very long TV show and telling myself that if I want to watch that show, I need to be on the bike, even if I'm not pedaling hard the entire time. Sucks that they took Xena off Netflix, I would've picked that one.