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The plan was hatched over cheese fries and fizzy, sugary drinks.

Consider it the last meal for two death-row inmates.

After two solid months of stress-driven soda binges and 2 a.m. romps to Cook Out, it was time for Joe and me to finally take our health seriously.

As longtime friends and now colleagues, we have watched each other's waistlines suffer for far too long. Being twenty-somethings, back fat is not really on the list of things that either of us wanted for ourselves.

Sadly, this is not the first time I have had this realization.

Everything sounds good over a plate of bacon cheese fries.

Their gooey, salty deliciousness breaks your spirit faster than anything this side of Jack Daniels. Soon you'll agree to anything. You find yourself saying "Sure -- let's get healthy! Let's lose ten pounds in ten weeks! And blog about it so complete strangers can watch our fat, pathetic attempts to resist Chinese takeout and double Whoppers with cheese!"

And that is, more or less, the way it happened with Amanda and me. Drunk on fat and nitrates, we vowed to clean up our act. But unlike many a late night drunken promise, this is one I intend to keep.

Not for Amanda -- though I trust she'll mock me mercilessly if I fail. Not for my health -- though I'd certainly like to walk a few flights of stairs without wheezing. No, I'm doing it because of The Drop.

They tell me I should be drinking more water.

Who? Everyone. My doctor, health experts, every diet guru from the "go vegetarian" folks to the "screw vegetables" Atkins crowd. They're all agreed -- if you want to lose weight and improve your health, drink eight glasses of water a day.

Eight 8 oz. glasses of water a day is 64 ounces total -- about 1.9 liters.

It sounds like a lot, but actually it's just a little more than three 20 ounce bottles of water over the course of twelve hours. I can (and have) put away that many Cokes, no problem. Of course that would net me nearly 60 milligrams of caffeine (yeah!) and 776 calories (boo!). That's like two meals worth of sugar.

Water, by contrast, gives me no caffeine and no calories -- but it also makes me run to the bathroom every twenty minutes.

Five days into my goal to eat five to nine servings of fruits and veggies a day (per the rules of the Get Health Guilford challenge), I have discovered just how hard it is eat all those good-for-you things. It's especially tough because I am kind of picky. Berries always seem too tart to me. Citrus stuff is worse. Melon is OK, but my life does not provide free time for slicing honey dew. And frankly, I couldn't look at one more apple today.

In an effort to make sure I got the day off right, I tried my first V8. Can I just ask, how did this junk stay on the market for so long???

If you haven't tried it, it is kind of like cold tomato soup with notes of dirty feet and cut grass. I drank it all, mind you. I am committed to the challenge. But I am going to need to find better ways to get there.

Any suggestions of sneaky ways I can get in the fruits and veggies?

Amanda and I have very different ways of watching what we eat.

Last night, on a four-mile walk during which we only got a little lost, we talked about how we want to decide what to eat -- and track what we eat - during these ten weeks.

Me -- I'm a counter. And not just calories. I like seeing how much everything I'm taking in, what I'm burning off and just how bad my habits are. That's why I've been using this great online site called SparkPeople to track everything I eat and how much I exercise. It's free, easy to use, has a wide database of nutritional information for all sorts of foods - from the grocery store to fast food joints and national chain restaurants. If it's not in the database, you can add it.

The site has a lot of other features -- community message boards, meal plans, etc. -- but the food and exercise trackers are really the only things I use. There's also a button to help you keep track of all the water you should be drinking (I know I'm drinking enough if I'm running to the bathroom every five minutes).

So as of 5 p.m. today here's what I had:

My big problem with food is that I don't -- and never have -- seen it as a source of nutrition. I know intellectually that you are what you eat -- but I see food mostly as a source of pleasure. I eat whatever I want and way too much of it because I don't bother thinking about how it affects my body beyond my taste buds.

With charts showing me the concrete science behind my choices, SparkPeople helps me think about what I eat, what it means for my body, and take responsibility for my choices rather than ignoring them and reaching for the next chicken wing.

I've had a serious soda problem for years. It's mostly the caffeine -- a common American addiction and an even more common one in newsrooms.

But soda's out if I want to lose ten pounds in ten weeks. I'm not big on diet sodas and have been getting my caffeine fix from sugar-free Red Bull. But there's gotta be some better stuff out there to drink when you just can't drink any more water.

What are you guys drinking?

The scale never lies. At least that is who I felt Sunday when I stopped on the cold glass scale and it blinked,"193.4"

Ta-da! About two pounds lost since last I weighed myself (11 days ago). If I can manage to keep it up, I might not embarrass myself by the end of this challenge.

Week One by the Numbers:
5-9 fruits/veggies every day: 7 days
Exercise: 6 days
Cheats: three that I remember (including Goobers at the movies)
Sugar soda: none
Pounds lost: about 2 1/2

This week's goal: no 8 p.m. to midnight snaking.

I will let Joe report his progress himself. But let me turn him in right now -- he didn't go to the gym all weekend.

Boo! Hiss!

Coke Zero, and the even tastier Cherry Coke Zero are my new best friends.

But do I even want to know what acesulfame potassium is doing to my body?

This weekend Amanda and I decided to try some good-for-you recipes she'd gotten from Food Network and Fit TV.

She went to the gym, I went to the grocery store. Or, more accurately, four grocery stores.

It turns out eating right isn't easy - or cheap.

I was caught red-handed .... with a McDonald's cup.

A very quick GTCC staffer called me out on the golden arches, iced-coffee concoction sitting mistily in my hot palm. She inquired about my drink of choice, considering my alleged attempts to give up fast food.

I never promised to give up coffee, I told her. I didn't buy a Big Mac or anything. Plus, I am only human, and I am taking this diet thing one day at a time.

Well, as long as you try again tomorrow, she told me.

I was knee deep in excuses by the time I returned to the office to check out the damage on McDonald's website: 130 calories, 5 grams of fat and 21 grams of sugar!

Hopefully next time someone will catch me before I get to the McDonald's register.

You know what best shocks you into the realization that you're really much too fat?

A picture that makes it undeniable.

At last year's ConvergeSouth blogger conference organizer Sue Polinsky snapped this photo of me:

And so Sue and her camera held up a dark mirror for me.

Definitely going to the gym tonight...

Technically, our friends Chris and Kitty did not know we were experimenting on them. But, that is sort of what we did.

When I first started dieting, I turned to the Food Network for solace. Sometimes just watching Nigella Lawson heat butter in a pan was enough to dull the cravings.

Fit TV -- that network almost totally populated by people in spandex -- has its own late-night food program that also tries to give you want you desire, this time without the fat and calories.
Healthy Decadence with Devin Alexander takes all those yummy fast food recipes and makes them a little more diet friendly.

The poor thing is up against Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives on the Food Network (that is the guy with the spiky hair who eats French fries and burgers for half an hour). But Alexander, who also penned the Biggest Loser Cookbook, somehow manages to make the stuff look halfway decent.

I was back at the gym today.

I was into my third mile when an older woman running on the machine next to me turned, did a double-take, smiled and said:

"So you're back at the gym today, huh?"

She had recognized me from the nearly life-size picture of me and Amanda on the front of the Life section yesterday.

"I read on the blog that you didn't go to the gym all weekend!" she said. "You have to do that every day!"

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

Amanda got the same scolding...er...encouragement from a GTCC staffer yesterday.

So it seems each of us has more than the other helping keep us on track. Thanks for the assist, little white haired lady at the gym.

Breakfast is, indeed, one of the most important meals of the day. And not just because your mom said so. You need to have a good breakfast to kickstart your metabolism, get some protein and fiber in your stomach to sustain you through the day and keep you from turning into a fast-food devouring animal by lunch-time.

I used to be pretty notorious for skipping breakfast (or worse, rolling out of bed, rubbing at my dry eyes, having a Red Bull and cutting myself shaving). But since we resolved to eat better, my breakfast has looked something like this each morning:

That's a bowl of oatmeal, an 8 oz. glass of orange juice and a slice of wheat toast with low-sugar grape jelly.

It's about 290 calories, 3 grams of fat, 5 grams of fiber and 12 grams of protein.

Sometimes I switch it up with a piece of fruit or Wheaties, but that's about the size of it.

And size matters. Watching the portions of the things I eat has been difficult, as my general tendency is to fill large bowls and glasses to the brim without caring how many servings it is. Take a look at the bowl in which I ate my one serving of oatmeal next to the bowl I would have probably filled with oatmeal (or Cocoa Puffs) two weeks ago:

Even filling that small glass to near the top with orange juice rather than about half-way would have been 12 ounces rather than 8.

These are things we should think about, but don't. Reprogramming my brain is going to be a large part of this thing.

What do you guys eat for breakfast? Snap a picture and send it to me at Joekillian@gmail.com. I'll post them here for everyone to see -- and hopefully get tips from. The first one of you to send me a shot of a Krispy Kreme Donut, though...

Reader Fred Gregory sends me the following piece about fried Mars bars and the awful, heart-stopping diets of Scottish people.

I'm Irish and Italian -- and we don't eat much better. But this deep fried Mars bar is one of the few pieces of candy I wouldn't want to eat right now...

Dear tall guy on the giant stair stepper,

I was very impressed by your initiative, pounding away on the exercise equipment at the gym.

I just don't want to stand within dripping range of your sweat water fall.

Good luck with your work out,

Amanda

I love my gym. It's cheap and clean and they have ten televisions, so I can watch Design on a Dime or Rock of Love while I elliptical my toosh off.

But Joe and I sometimes get bored with the routine. So how about you suggest a fun and calorie-burning activity for us to try?

Here's a couple of things you should know in advance, when you make your suggestion:

1) I don't run. I am not built for it.
2) Neither of us have any shame whatsoever, so be creative.
3) It should be something local and not too pricey (no spa vacations please). The N&R hasn't exactly offered us a budget to do this.

We'll pick the best suggestions and let all of you vote on which ones we should try.

So what do you say? How should we get fit? Roller-skating? Boot camp?

We'll take suggestions until Feb. 22 and try it next weekend -- and take photos and video for you guys to enjoy at our expense.

Amanda and I have been weighing ourselves every Sunday -- and as she's down with the flu, coughing and moaning and trying not to speak, it falls to me to do this week's report.

Last Sunday:

Joe - 219.8 lbs.

Amanda - 193.4 lbs

Today:

Joe - 216.00 lbs.

Amanda - 191.0 lbs.

Net loss:

Joe - 2.8 lbs.

Amanda: 2.4 lbs.

Amanda says she thinks her weight loss this week was due primarily to getting sick toward the end, not eating much of anything and laying in bed for two days coughing and drinking water.

Joe realizes he's not going to the gym nearly as much as Amanda and theorizes that his weight loss is due primarily to giving up soda and crap food, eating more fruits and vegetables.

Week two by the numbers:

5-9 fruits/veggies every day: 4 days for Amanda, 6 for Joe
Exercise: 3 days for both Amanda and Joe
Cheats: Valentine's Day dinner (including dessert and booze), ice cream one night this week.
Sugar soda: None.

This week's goals:

Last week Amanda wanted to curb snacking after 8 p.m. This week she's just hoping for healthier snacking during the day.

Last week Joe wanted to get to the gym more often. This week, having gone only 3 days, he wants to push it to five.

Amanda is at home today, wondering how many calories there are in Tamiflu.

But I'm in the office, happy to have found these in our vending machine.

I'm also laughing at this piece on karaoke spin classes my colleague Sonja Elmquist sent me from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Mick Jagger's voice fills the tiny room, crooning "Ruby Tuesday." A voice from the back calls out, "Is that the Beatles?" Her classmates fill her in. Next, as the Stones start "You Can't Always Get What You Want," McCool-Fry makes the words come true when she tells the class to adjust the resistance on their bikes to "riding somewhere between mud and quicksand." The cyclers comply. As the workout increases in intensity, another voice calls out, "We need Prince to get us through this." Everyone laughs.

Part of me thinks this would be a blast. But another part of me suspects it would be joining the humiliation of not being very fit witht he humiliation of not being able to sing very well.

And I'd be out the door the moment they played "Physical" by Olivia Newton-John...

Two weeks into the challenge my pants are fitting a little looser. Like a lot of men, I carry most of my excess weight in my gut and midsection. The pants are the first place I notice it when I drop some weight.

Which is why this whole losing weight thing is really a double edged sword: if you don't do it, you're going to have more health problems, feel disgusting and generally have a lower quality of life. But lose enough and you find you have to buy new clothes.

Less expensive than a by-pass, but still a pain...

Well Amanda seems to be coming out of Flu territory -- though she still doesn't seem 100%.

I, however, seem to be going into it.

Eating right when you're sick is a challenge because you often don't want to eat anything -- and when you are hungry, you want comfort foods that can't be good for you. Going into our third week there's been more cheating because summoning the will to care for yourself is hard when you can barely summon the will to lift your head before coughing up a lung.

I know a lot of you are under the weather out there -- how are you handling it?

As I write this, my fingers are leaving greasy little Chick-fil-A stains on the keys. After four days of having no appetite whatsoever, I treated myself to a little fast food.

Now, I have no doubt that my influenza diet will compensate for this little indiscretion. However, my little lunchtime excursion proves something I already knew about myself: I have no ability to moderate my actions.

Joe can go to Burger King and pick out a 400 calorie meal. He can order the junior Whopper with no cheese. He can get the side salad.

I'm like the alcoholic. I can't just have one drink. I can't go to the fast food joint and not have the worst possible thing on the menu, the exact thing I want at that exact moment.

For right now, I am not going to feel too bad. I haven't had fried chicken in weeks. Plus, I guarantee you I have lost weight just in coughing alone this week. But I am also going to reaffirm my resolve and say that fast food has to be out of my life forever.

Yeah -- where staying healthy is concerned, this week has been almost a complete wash.

Amanda and I both came down with the flu and spent a lot of time coughing, stuffing ourselves with medication and, more than once, ordering in and not really caring about calories, fat, cholesterol or any of the rest of it.

The urge to comfort food culminated last night when we actually ordered in Chinese. My love for Chinese food is just this side of being a substance abuse problem, and this is the first time since vowing to get healthy that I've had any. We did split one entree (they're more than big enough for it and that's a good way to mitigate the initial bad decision) but I also ordered dumplings. Like Amanda caving to ice cream, this was my low point. And I was too sick to even enjoy it properly.

Neither of us have been to the gym this week, either. But Amanda's on the mend and I should be by next week. We'll be working hard next week to make up for this one.

My get fit-n-healthy plans may have come to a shuddering halt this week. But let me reiterate this here and now: I will not give up.

As soon as I can do mild activity without getting dizzy, I am going back to the gym. And tonight, I am cooking our now favorite chicken and veggie stiry-fry (delicious and low in fat!)

Normally, I would let a week of stalled progress get me down. But not this time. I'm gonna beat the belly!

Things are still amiss in Cheesefry Nation. Today Joe and I figured we were well enough to venture into the world for a movie. But I ended up napping all afternoon. And Joe got up to go buy more tissues, and found himself too dizzy to drive. The flu is still kicking our butts.

However, in the interest of maintaining honesty in this process, here is week three, byt the numbers:

Joe:
5-9 fruits/veggies every day: 2 days
Exercise: 0 days
Cheats: plenty
Sugar soda: none
Pounds lost this week: 0
Weight: 216
Total pounds lost: 3

Amanda:
5-9 fruits/veggies every day: 2 days
Exercise: 0 days
Cheats: plenty
Sugar soda: none
Pounds lost this week: 2
Weight: 189
Total pounds lost: 7

This week, we start off by getting back on the wagon by eating right. The exercise is going to have to wait until we finally get rid of our sickness.

Meanwhile, fellow reporter Ryan Seals is itching to get us out for some military-style calisthenics. Do stay tuned for that.

The USDA food pyramid is baffling -- and it might not be right for everyone.

Here's the government's attempt to tailor it to every individual.

Hi. My name is Amanda, and I am a snack-a-holic.

It's been one day since my last snack. It was a bag of popcorn and a half cup of mini chocolate chips. I ate them in alternating mouthfuls. It was salty and sweet. Delicious. I ate this at 11 p.m. at night. In front of the television.

I am ashamed of my habits. I know I am not hungry, but I snack anyway. It's especially bad when I have a deadline coming at work, and I am having a tough time writing a story. I once told an intern that I couldn't figure out how to start my story, so I needed a bag of chips.

My work doesn't help the situation. I recently went to an employee training where they handed out free coupons for the vending machines as prizes. And these aren't just soda can machines and packages of crackers. The News & Record has the Taj Mahal of vending machines: 20 different kinds of drinks, a machine full of sandwiches and even an ice cream novalities machine. With so much choice, how can I NOT snack?

Anyway, I am taking it one day at a time. I am filling up on water throughout the day so my tummy is full (that always makes it harder to snack.) And I am bringing apples to work, so if I absolutley must snack, it will at least be a good one.

Here's hoping I can give up snacking all together.

Reader Elaine asked if we could post the recipe for the stir-fry we've been making at home for the last few weeks.

It's so simple I'm almost embarassed to call it a recipe. We usually buy the ingredients at Harris Teeter, but you can get this stuff just about anywhere. I went to Food Lion the other night and saved some money doing it.

Anyway, here's what we do. It's pretty simple, as we're not expert cooks.

Ingredients:
1 lb. boneless, skinless chicken breast diced
(260 calories, 3 grams fat)
6 oz. Eat Smart Vegetable stir-fry mix
(includes fresh cut broccoli, snow peas, carrots, red cabbage - 50 calories, 0 fat)
2 tbsp. Kikkoman Stir-Fry Sauce
(20 calories per tbsp., 0 fat, 520 mg of sodium)
2 cups rice (410 calories, 1 gram fat)
Simply dice chicken and brown in a large pan. Drain any excess fat or water.
Add stir fry mix and stir fry sauce and let simmer for about 5 minutes.
Serve over rice.

Divided into two equal servings the whole thing is 380 calories and 2 grams of fat per serving. And that would be two very large servings. We usually have a bit left over.
You can also steam the vegetables seperately -- any vegetables you like, really -- if you don't like them stir fried with the sauce and the chicken.

We think it's pretty delicious.

Congrats to Joe, who got his health back and promptly went to the gym last night.

And it's a good thing he did, since he is spending the whole day celebrating his recent journalism successes will cake. Got to love those award dinners, but the menu is murder on the thighs.

My job is inherently sedentary. I sit at a desk. I stare at a screen -- so much, in fact, that my eye doctor has begged me to make an effort to look away from the computer every fifteen minutes or so.

Of course, my eyeballs are only two very small victims of this immobile lifestyle.

But never fear, office dwellers. Get Healthy Guilford director Leslie Armeniox has some tips for you to add a little activity into your desk life:

* Stand up for a few minutes, maybe while chatting on the phone or when conversing with a cubicle mate.

"Standing a little bit every hour keeps your metabolism going," she says.

* Wake up your inner child and whack a balloon around for a little while. If you do it with your hands over your heart, you will really get the blood flowing.

* Stretch a little. "It's important to take that break," Armeniox says.

None of these is going to make you lose those love handles. But it still counts toward Get Healthy Guilford "move more" motto.

Since we began our mission to drop 10 lbs. in 10 weeks friends, family and complete strangers have been dropping knowledge on us -- and introducing us to some great products we'd never tried before.

My favorites so far:

Our friend Kitty Campbell suggested we try the new Chocolate Cherry Diet Dr. Pepper.

I'm not big on diet soda, but this one's got me hooked. The secret: it actually tastes like chocolate and cherries and I can't detect the aspartame they're using to sweeten it. That may be because it's well down the list of ingredients, behind some other artificial (and some natural) flavors. They're calling it a "Limited Edition" -- and if they really do away with it, I'm going to be heartbroken.

Our friend and co-worker Janet Brindle Reddick turned us on to the Orville Redenbacher Kettle Korn mini-bags. The Kettle Korn is both salty and sweet -- and the mini-bag is actually the perfect amount of popcorn for just 100 calories a bag.

Next, we're going to test-drive these Bird's Eye and Green Giant steam-in-bag vegetable servings. We hear good things.

What are some of your favorite guilt-free snacks?