My eating habits and what I never eat — since my weight loss.

I’ve spent the last year and a half of my life taking my passion for running to a new level. But it didn’t start with some discrete moment when I decided — as an example — to run a fast marathon (run a marathon I did eventually, in October of this year, breaking the 3-hour barrier!). It started with losing weight. Well, it was all concurrent. You can be in relatively good shape — like I was even before my weight loss — but you can’t run at a radically new level if you’re not lean. Just think of walking or running carrying a bag that weighs thirty pounds. You can’t possibly move faster with that bag than without.

That’s how much weight I dropped — about thirty pounds, over the course of a few months. I’m now at about 155 pounds. I exercised more, and I ate less. It was that simple formula, not some magic diet. My “before” and “after” pictures are in this story.

While I don’t follow any particular diet, I do have certain rules that I follow. They’ve worked for me so far, so I’m sticking with them.

First, the biggest question of all. Is it really “never” as I say in the title? It’s a difficult question actually. Shouldn’t you be easy on yourself every now and then? Some rules I’ve never broken. Others I abandoned because I struggled with them. So my opinion is this: don’t wake up one morning and make big commitments or promises relating to your diet. Do commit on the overall direction, but experiment and be ready to adjust. You don’t know what’s going to…