Hello, and, this my new healthy eating effort.

I'm a 5'4 male, 40 years old. With my small frame I weighed 130lbs after University. I'm trying to change the way I eat and feel physically. I have a desk job, workout 3-5 times a week, enjoy beer/wine/snacks on (too) many evenings, and am really trying to transform how and what I eat.

On April 16th, 2015, I weighed 163.5 lbs. That day, I logged all my food into MyFitnessPal. The 4 beers and huge bowl of buttered popcorn brought me over 1000 calories too much! If I ate every day like this I'd be over 170 lbs in 5 weeks!

I committed to trying to eat following the Harvard Healthy Plate guide. I reduced my grainy-carbs by starting with a big batch of brown&wild rice, eating only 1/2 cup per meal. Bit of protein every meal. 2 cups of fresh fruit/veggies every meal. 1/2 cup of milk at a meal if I feel like it.

Exercise has been 20-25 minutes running with a single circuit of body weight exercises - pull-ups, box jumps, push-ups, and step-ups.

I'm doing the 0.5lbs loss/week. If I have extra calories at the end of the day, so far I have: a) left them there b) have a 150mL glass of red wine or c) have a 1/2 cup vanilla ice cream with chopped strawberries or d) eat a small meal of leftovers.

I have 2-4 regular home-mugs of black coffee every morning. No desire to change this habit.

I play ice hockey Sunday nights. It is an adult hockey school so I'm out on the ice for 50 minutes, with few breaks!

Today, April 22nd, 2015, I weighed 158.2 lbs. That's a lot of weight in a few days!

I'm sleeping better (but not perfect) and feeling a whole lot more energetic. I'm surprisingly not feeling much in the way of cravings.

Once in a while I've been so full from eating all those veggies I've had to put the food aside until later. Blandness might come into play at some point but I've eaten my veggies pretty plain for the past while.

Today I tweaked my macro-nutrient goals to ~150g of carbs and ~126g of protein (0.82g/lb of body weight). This ups my fat intake a bit so I'll be picking up some almonds.

I've literally never posted to a forum like this. I'm excited to see progress, started to take some notes in an email (for future reference) and then said to myself, 'Self, go ahead and post this on the myfitnesspal forum.'

So I am