Hi, I'm Michael Magnus, and I'm starting the Keto Diet.

Now, I've looked at a lot of diets over my entire life as an overweight person and none of them really spoke to me. And so I tried a bunch of different things over the years and had some limited success, but the Keto Diet kind of makes sense to me because you're training your body to burn fat for energy… and I have plenty of fat.

I have two kids, a five year old and a newborn. But my five year old is my stepdaughter. Although I've known her since she was pretty little, I didn't do the whole diapers, midnight feedings, and dad thing, so this is all new to me.

Something that happened while my wife was pregnant is that I gained a lot of pregnancy weight. I gained about 30 pounds, and I wasn't thin to begin with, but apparently it's not terribly uncommon. After digging around a little bit, I learned that dad's tend to show pregnancy symptoms as well, but that doesn’t give me an excuse to stay unhealthy. I really need to get in shape anyway. I'm 33 and I am at this point almost 290 pounds, which I feel weird saying out loud because that seems like a private thing. I carry it well, I've been told, but it's still a lot. I'm 33 and on heart medication, and it's a little bit scary.

I want to make sure that I can get in better shape, so that I can be around for a long time for my kids. What I'm trying to do is figure out ways that I can do the newborn dad thing while still working and doing everything else and then trying to lose weight on top of that. I think Keto might be the way to do it and I'm looking forward to trying it. If nothing else, I love bacon and cheese and it's basically a bacon and cheese diet, so I'm going to be pretty happy with the results either way.

I know that I need to lose weight, but a factor in that is time. I need a diet that I can be successful on in a limited schedule.

The other thing is budget.

I am a lecturer at a university and, although I love it, it's more or less a teacher's salary. So now we are a one income household with two kids on a teacher's salary. Most of the time when I think of healthy eating, I think of more expensive grocery stores and things like that, which adds up pretty quickly. One of the challenges with dieting will simply be doing it affordably.

Those are the two main factors that I'm worried about, the two main things that I'm kind of trying to navigate is limited time and limited finances, but I know that I need to get my health back on track.

I was challenged by a friend of mine to do a blog. Not for vanity, but for accountability. It's real easy to start a diet and then get off track and so I'm really hoping that by making these videos and writing blogs about my experience, it will give me something to be accountable to myself.

We’ll see how that works out. Hopefully this isn't the only blog I ever make on the topic and then give up… but we've all been there. I'm hoping to do better this time and I'm really motivated. There's something about having a newborn that really makes you put life in perspective. You stare at their little face and you know they are totally reliant on you and you really start to think to yourself, "Man, do I have enough life insurance?" and all of these other daunting things. I want to make sure I'm around for a long time, for my kids, and I know to do that I need to get healthier.

So here I go. We'll start this journey and see how it goes.