Day one of taking the Ernie’s Fitness Challenge came on Thursday when I went to Ernie’s to do the initial weigh-in, which officially launched me into 60 days of healthy eating, working out and boatloads of public pressure I’m putting on myself by doing this weekly column.

I don’t know why I felt apprehension about the weigh-in, since I wasn’t going to look at the number and won’t weigh myself until Day 60. Maybe it was because I knew someone else would be looking at it, but then I saw the other apprehensive people around me waiting to be weighed and I realized I wasn’t alone, sucked it up and got on the scale.

Whatever the number was doesn’t really matter anyway because how I’m measuring “success” isn’t how many pounds I lose; it’s how fit I am, how my muscle tone is looking and how I feel. One thing I will do is take my measurements and see how working out begins to (hopefully) sculpt my body back into its athletic form. Inches are important and much more telling than pounds anyway.

I was interviewed by CBC Radio on Wednesday to talk about doing this challenge publicly. I guess they stumbled across my first column about embarking on this crazy adventure and wanted to talk to me about it. From what I’m getting, it’s not every day that journalists do something like this in the public eye, but I don’t really see the big deal.

Sure, I see why some might thing I’m bold or just plain nuts, but how I see it is the pressure might be that extra little boost I need to keep going to the gym and making sure I don’t cave in to buying chocolate (my favourite). I did this to myself, but I did it knowing what I’m getting into.

I’ve been told that getting back in shape is 70 per cent diet, 30 per cent exercise and since that’s the case, I’m overhauling what I’ve been stuffing into my face over the past while, especially over the holidays.

Rather than do something extreme like a low-carb diet or some other fad that people jump all over in the New Year, I’m trying to eat natural, non-processed foods, like brown rice instead of white, whole wheat, super healthy bread and lots of veggies. What I’m going to do for the diet side of things is a calorie cap at 500 calories less a day than I’m supposed to intake. In the scheme of things that’s not extreme, and for my size I’m supposed to have a lot of calories.

To help with this, I’m going to use a free phone app and website called My Fitness Pal. You put in what you weigh, and what your fitness goal is, and it will set you a healthy, non-extreme calorie cap. It’s actually amazing because you can look up any food in its database. Say if you eat an apple at lunch, you look it up, find apple, and add it to ‘lunch’ in your daily journal. That’ll be 90 calories and then it will subtract that from your calorie limit and you do that throughout the day to ensure you don’t overeat. It has anything you can think of eating, even Tim Horton’s sandwiches and coffee and it’s interesting to see how many calories are actually in the foods we consume. You’d be blown away by some pasta dishes, for the record.

Another great thing about My Fitness Pal is it tells you to drink eight glasses of water a day at least, and when you exercise and do 30 minutes of cardio, you can look that up in its database too and it will add calories you’ve burned back onto your limit for that day so that you don’t under-eat. It’s incredible and extremely helpful for those combining diet and exercise and you can take it with you anywhere on your cell phone.

So exercise, drinking lots of water, eating natural foods and decreasing my calorie limit by 500 is basically what I’m going to be doing over the next two months. Another big thing I’m cutting out (which is the worst) is beer. If I do want to have a drink at Egan’s or wherever, I’m going to try to have wine, which is better for you and has fewer calories. Alcohol in general should be avoided, but I know I’ll want to have a drink with friends once in a while and I’m not a nun.

Oh, and cheat days – you have to give yourself a cheat day. Pick a day, like Sunday, and treat yourself to something you love. Fitness trainers swear by these, and say that cheat days actually keep people on track because it gives you something to look forward to at the end of the week and is a bit of a reward for all your hard work.

So, without further ado, here goes nothing. By next Friday’s column I should be nice and grumpy, so you’ll get a rather entertaining piece of writing, I’m sure, with all the confessions that go with trying to meet fitness goals.