Pictures and Words

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and for the month of February, I am only eating twenty-eight dollars worth of food. I hope I do not die!

Either the scales are faulty, the bag weighs 100 grams, or...bonus rice!!

Remember how last night I promised another update? Well, I got home, fell straight into bed, and slept for 14 hours instead. That is a lot of sleep. The original plan was to nap briefly, then get up and update the site, but apparently I was really tired. You can blame it on the 28 Days Diet, but I’m more inclined to link it tobeing out until 2am at the Pancake Manor the night before, and then waking up early to go shopping for rice.

I’m awake now, and ready to weigh myself. On the charts, the “starting weight” will be from Day 2, but it can’t be helped.

All through high school, every science teacher I had always made disparaging remarks about people in general referring to their body-size as “Weight”, such as ”Weight Watchers”.

“Weight,” they would explain, “is a force. Weight is the force of your body being pulled towards the ground by gravity. Mass refers to size. When people say ‘I want to lose weight,’ what they really should be saying is ‘I want to lose mass’. If Weight Watchers took everyone to Antarctica, then everyone would technically have lose weight, because it’s further away from the centre of the earth.”

Without getting into words being defined by how people use them (prescription vs description) I always thought that my science teachers were full of shit. When you lose mass, you’re are losing weight – and since we measure it using scales, and are unlikely to travel into space any time soon, mass is irrelevant, and it may as well be referred to as “losing weight”. It’s just as accurate.

That’s not at all relevant to the experiment, it’s just always bugged me.

While we were out shopping yesterday, Em and I bought a set of scales. It cost $29.95, which amused me greatly – I spent more on the scale than I will be spending on food for the entire month.

We bought it from a cheap shop, and the instructions all came in Italian. It took us a while to get it working.

As well as weighing myself each day, I’ll be taking a photo of myself in my boxers, both from the side and from the front. 

It’s for science.

People, please! Stop trying to have sex with the screen!

I don’t normally look that grumpy, but I’d just woken up from 14 hours of sleep.  Knowing that I’d be doing this experiment during February, I’d really been letting myself eat whatever I liked for a week or two, so I don’t think I normally have that much of a belly. I have no excuse for the bad posture.

Also: I didn’t have anyone to take the photos, so this was done using the auto-timer. Future photos will be taken by Cannibal Kate, and will be a little less shit.

Starting weight:

73.3kg! I didn't even notice that I had odd socks on until I uploaded the photo.

For the sake of our American readers: 73.3kg = 81 pounds.

I’ll continue to weigh myself each day, to see if my weight goes up or down. (I suspect that it will go down.) If I start losing weight at a dangerous rate, I’ll probably go and see a doctor. Does anyone know what counts as a dangerous rate of weight loss?

Dream:

Last night, I dreamt about the project, so I’ve decided to post relevant dreams to the blog as well. I was in a supermarket, and there was a lot of food-testing going on. I had already tried a mandarine and a mushroom before I remembered that I wasn’t meant to be eating, and by then it was too late and I’d swallowed them. I was really worried about whether I should abandon the project, or change the rules to allow food tasting.

I don’t dream every night, and I won’t subject you to non-food-related dreams, but I’ll be interested to see how much this project affects my subconscious. StinkyPete only caused me to have one meat-related dream, but it was pretty unpleasant, and this project is much more likely to affect my mental state.

There will be two updates a day – one in the morning with weight, dreams and body-shots, and one in the evening with the food diary, any new purchases made, and anything else that needs addressing. Stay tuned!

Up next: Daily food update! (with photos)

(total money spent so far - $12.20)

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