As I mentioned in the comments of yesterday's fitness post, my last two weeks have been fairly anomalous in terms of my diet. We ate at church and/or other people's homes a lot more than we normally do. Calorie counting for food you didn't prepare isn't a step I've reached yet. So I started calorie counting, but then basically scrapped it as complexities arose. Time to get back to it though.
One of the things that might help is that the Easter Bunny brought me two different diet cookbooks (The Biggest Loser cook book and a slow cooker diet book), both of which have calorie counts (and other nutrition info) for each recipe. I'm committing to using both cookbooks frequently for the next month. I'll try to stick pretty exactly to the recipes too. I'm not one to add butters and oils and such to my daily diet (if I'm making something designed to be a little fancier/impressive, I'll go that route, but day-in/day-out, I'm pretty good about those fats), so I think I'll be able to use what they've got without feel the urge to deviate too dramatically. We'll see if it helps. I'm a little leery about The Biggest Loser cookbook, since they appear to go very frequently to the highly-processed sugar/fat substitutes, and very specific brands of thing. And a lot of their tricks seem to be the same (ooh, whole wheat tortillas!). But for a month or so, to get a better handle on calorie counting, I can go to that well.
I'm still right around 200 lbs., with a little fluctuation down, followed by a little fluctuation upward. My first-level target is 185, coming down from 210. I'm still not half way there, but I figure I'm losing a little under a pound a week at this point. If I can keep that up, in 4 more months I'll be at my target. That actually sounds pretty good to me.
It's pretty tough to count calories unless you have a plan. I'm the type of person that can eat the same thing over and over. That makes calorie counting a lot easier.
Yeah... I need variety. Dean's spreadsheet looks really helpful, so I'm going to keep using that. I've been pretty good about breakfast/lunch/snacks in the office, it's just been dinner that is toughest. So... between sticking to these cookbooks for most of our dinners, and using the spreadsheet for calculations, I'm feeling like this could work.
I understand that. I know that I'm an outlier, but even when not counting calories, I'm an eat the same thing everyday kind of guy.
Week and a half ago I ran a 5K and may have pushed it too hard. Next run I had my right calf muscle seize up after 2 miles. I laid off of it for a while, got a massage, etc., but just tried to go out for a run and got 1 block before the calf said no, ain't happening.
I like to eat a lot of different foods, but since I've been looking up calories for so long I've gotten pretty good at estimating. I still look things up, even measure food weight to try to be accurate, but I can plan ahead better just by knowing about what a food has in advance. That said, after I make my first guess I always add about 20% on because it's easy to underestimate the amount of calories in food.
Did Clyde's Connecticut River ride this afternoon (25 mi). Cold and windy, but glad to do something, as Dr. Patel has grounded me from running.
I played basketball for two hours today. Spinning may be a great workout, but it's nice to find some of these other muscles again.
Did Andy's Morning Ride (30 mi) earlier today. Nice route including CT farmland (tobacco fields, etc.) as well as historic houses (many dating from 16-1700's). Very windy/gusty (tough with the ZIPPs 404s on the bike).