Posts tagged Weights and Measures

Daily Log

February 18, 2011 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

These will just be short posts where I can keep myself honest with the world.

Yesterday…  Burned 2335.  Ate 2278.  so that’s only a difference of 57.  That’s good.

Weight this AM 133.6… so a little higher (I’m not kidding myself… actual weight doesn’t change that fast, but I’ll take what I can get).

We are going to the Dragon Buffet on Saturday.  I publicly vow that on Saturday I WILL eat 500 calories more than I burn… just to prove to myself that going over is not going to do anything bad.

So there’s that.

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Stop It!

February 17, 2011 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

I cannot lose any more weight.

Seriously.

My preferred weight range is 135 to 140.

I am now sitting at 133.4

EVEN THOUGH I AM EATING 2200 TO 2300 CALORIES A DAY!!

So… I really need to fix this.

How do we do that?  Well… in my case, we announce to the world that WE INTEND TO STOP IT!

So…  I’m gonna start posting here how I am doing with eat vs. burn for the day.

Introduce a little accountability…  because I think in my head.. oh, well… just 150 under burn for the day isn’t that much…

But it adds up if you do that too much.  So I need to make sure that I am eating what I burn.

It’s a little difficult sometimes… for example… derby practice ends at 10 pm.  Last night I had assumed practice would be 450 calories… but it ended up being 600… and I already had my post practice snack planned… and I didn’t want to add ALL THAT MUCH MORE food to my day.

ANYWAY….

The point is… GOT TO STOP IT!

So…

Yesterday…  Eat 2363  Burn 2531  Net = -168

I am hoping to come within 50 to 100 calories of burn each day.  I will be closer today because it’s yoga day…  so there’s that.

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Putting on the Brakes

December 22, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

So when I quit the crack powdered non-dairy creamer, it kind of kicked off a whole new “trying to eat healthier” thing that I have been doing of late.

I’m doing things like actually cooking food on the stove-top… things like rice and eggs and fish, BEANS for goodness sakes.

I have gotten my sodium intake to, well, OK, 2500mg a day is still high by recommendation standards, but it’s about half of what I used to be eating.

I’m getting things like adequate fiber and protein, fats and carbohydrates.

The combo of tracking exactly how much I eat, combined with the awesomeness that is the Body Media arm band telling me what I burn has really made me see that I was previously eating far too little.

I thought that I had crappy metabolism and could only eat tiny amounts.  But it turns out that, hey!  Only eating tiny amounts will GIVE YOU crappy metabolism.

I started out eating my “normal” amount, and I lost a few pounds…  I had put on about 5 over the course of this year and I thought, well, hey, sure, I’ll lose these.

So I did.

And then I decided, well… I guess I need to eat more, so I can stop losing.

And I upped my calories. And you know what happened?  My body said “OH MY GOD!!!  THE LONG FAMINE IS OVER!  LET’S GET BACK TO WORK, EVERYONE!”

And I lost another pound.

So I upped my calories again.

And I lost another pound.

This is not, actually, my goal.  I have a goal weight.  I’m at it.  I want to stay here.  I did not get all that damn skin taken in just so I could go and get all saggy again.

So I’ll up my calories again, and see where that goes.

So far, I am a) less cold all the time.  b) less tired all the time.

And, yes, I’m still obsessively counting calories, etc, but now it’s more like at the end of the day I am looking at the burn clock and thinking “Jeeze, I need to eat again” instead of getting to the end of the day and thinking “Jeeze, I wish breakfast would hurry up and come around.”

I’ve learned a lot from the people at the Calorie Counter web site forums, but when I stumbled upon “Eat more to lose weight” I thought they were crazy.  I thought… “now that’s not going to work for me, because I have screwed up my metabolism” – but it seems they were right.

Oh science, my brainy nemesis, you win again!

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Where have all the standards gone?

December 17, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged

So I just got a new kitchen scale.

I found out the following.

My cup measure holds less than a cup.  My half cup measure holds more than half a cup.  My quarter cup measure holds more than a quarter of a cup.  My tablespoon?  Yeah… THAT thing holds quite a bit more than a tablespoon.

And people wonder why it’s so hard to figure out what we eat… heck, even when you are TRYING to count right, the measures can be off.

Handily, with the new food scale, I will be able to tell… because a cup might not be a cup, but a gram is a gram is a gram.

 

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Good To Have a Plan

November 23, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged , ,

Food-based celebrations are always a little fraught for me.

Let’s face it… pretty much everywhere on the planet, food is considered an appropriate reward for good behavior, or a necessity to celebrations and get-togethers.

Did something go well at work?  Let’s take the group out to lunch as a reward.  Is it your birthday?  anniversary? Here, have some cake.

People WANT to feed other people.  It’s human nature.

But to me… none of that is a reward.

So… I did something good, and as a reward, you want to take me out to lunch?

But I already had my food panned for the day.  I have my can of soup.  I know how many calories is in it.  I know what my post-lunch and then afternoon snack are going to be.

Now you want to take me out some place where I have no idea what the nutritional information is.  You want me to have to guess my way through the menu… find something that “looks” like it might be healthy enough and have a similar number of calories as what I already planned.  Let me go ahead and tell you… it’s probably not going to be anything very “good”… a salad with some chicken on it is usually the only safe bet in most restaurants.  I would be MUCH HAPPIER if you had just said thank you and left me alone to my soup.

Handily… my boss is well aware of my eating preferences… so any impromptu outings they do while he’s in town, will stop by my office “just to check” to see if I want to go, but there’s no expectation that I will.  So there, they have fulfilled the need to be gracious and invite me, but don’t actually expect me to go along.  If the boss is coming in and wants to do some kind team dinner or something…  he gives me plenty of notice.  I’m not against going out, per se…  just let me work it into the overall plan.

I mean… lord knows that I love me some cake.  But I don’t want to have it as a surprise.  I need to make sure that it fits into my overall eating for the day.  Which it totally can, but not if it’s spring on me at the last minute when I’ve already had 3/4 of my daily intake!

So, speaking of things that require advance planning.

Thanksgiving is coming.

Historically, no matter what I “intend” to do, I end up eating too much on this day of excess.

So I thought I had better have a plan going in this year.

Handily… my nutrition tracker really helps with this… it’s easier to see exactly what you can do if you have a better idea of what each item is going to “cost” you.

There’s some things I love about Thanksgiving.  My Mom’s mashed potato stuffing… Her Mashed Carrots and Turnips (I know, it sounds gross, but I love them)… Cranberry Sauce…. Mac and Cheese.

But even though I DEFINITELY want to eat all these things.  There’s no reason I should eat so much that I am going to make myself sick.

So This year, I have pre-registered what I am eating for Thanksgiving dinner with my calorie counter.

It’s still a lot of food.  But I’m hoping that going in armed with a measuring cup and a plan will help me to STOP eating before I am so full I want to throw up.

Thu, Nov 25 2010
 Grade Grams Cals
Dinner

1/2 cup Stuffing
C 75 190

1/4 Jellied Cranberry
70 110

3 Cups Caesar Salad Prepared Mix Lite – Completes
B- 300 300

6 oz Turkey Hen Breast
168 270

1/2 cup Baked Macaroni and Cheese
C- 57 111

1/4 cup Carrots
A 57 14

1/4 cup Turnips
A 58 13
Total Calories Consumed 1,008

I have, in the past, tried to just go with the salad… but then I feel like I missed the “meal” after that, and I end up going back for the higher calorie stuff anyway.

Here I get to have all the less healthy stuff on the plate at the same time as I am loading up on salad… I think this is a workable plan that will let me get through the day without feeling either sick or “bad” about my choices.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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New Toy!

November 17, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

I believe I have mentioned before that I am a sucker for numbers.

Well… I am getting a new toy that is going to put me into paroxysms of information joy…

http://www.bodymedia.com/

This armband is worn all the time and constantly feeds the wristband with information about how much exercise you’ve done and how many calories have been burned over the course of a day.

Combined with the web site which tracks food, it will tell me exactly how much I should eat to maintain my desired weight.

I’m constantly whinging about having a “slow metabolism”…  now, that could be true, or it could be my imagination just based on how much I would LIKE to eat vs. how much I actually CAN eat (and stay the same weight).

This little baby will give me all the info that I need to either a) understand that I am kidding myself, and that if I really want to eat all the cake in the world, well, I’ll have to work out more… or b) bring all this info to my doctor and say “look here!  this isn’t right!  Fix it!”

Best part?  When I posted on facebook that I wanted one, I found out a friend of mine had one she didn’t want anymore, and she’s selling it to me for half price.  Woot!

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Numbers Game

February 24, 2010 · Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged ,

Trigger Warning – scale talk…

Health talk often centers around numbers.  Some are useful and some are not… but regardless, the numbers fascinate me.

I weigh myself every day… not to punish or berate myself for moving up or down or whatever… but because I am interested in how my behavior and work outs and eating, etc from the previous day have impacted my body and the only realistic way I can see that impact is on the scale.

But I love all the numbers.

I love to get my lab tests back when I go for my annual physical and see my cholesterol numbers -  HDL, LDL, Triglycerides, and Thyroid and whatever other numbers that the doc decided to test for that time around.

Fascinating!

If I could afford it, I would go and have one of those resting metabolic rate tests.  Now THERE’S a number I’d like to see.  I am convinced that my body burns almost no calories at all (based on how it reacts to, say, a day at the Mexican Buffet).  But i’d love to have a real test that told me exactly what I burn at rest, during exercise, etc.  But those tests are a couple of hundred dollars, and I can always think of something better to do with that money (Mexican Buffet, anyone?)

So last week, in furtherance of my data collection crusade, I went on Amazon and ordered a new scale.

My existing scale is about 10 years old, and it’s quite a bit “off” from the Dr. scale – which is fine, really, because for me, the actual number that it reads isn’t really as important as whether it’s staying pretty much the same.  But still, I thought it might be nice to have a more accurate one, and so I splurged.

I bought a super-fancy new scale that not only tells me my weight, it also runs a little electric current through the body and tells the percentage of body fat and the percentage of water.

This to me is some super cool info.  Water percentage?  I try to stay properly hydrated, but knowing the actual percent will be interesting… and seeing how it varies day to day, etc. is something I will look forward to.  Body fat percentage is also something I want to know about.  One of my current fitness goals is to get stronger, and put some additional muscle on my core and upper body.  The body fat percentage is really just a backwards way of being able to tell if I am adding muscle to my frame, so that’s going to help in tracking that goal.

One of the things I like about this scale is all the warnings that the company had out on their web site – most specifically aimed at women, telling them how important it is to not try to get body fat percentage down below the recommended range for their age, and explaining the difference between how much body fat a “regular” person should have vs. a professional weight lifter, etc.  It just seemed nice to me that a company that sells a product that could so clearly be a negative influence on someone who had an eating disorder would take any time at all to think about warning people not to use the data to beat themselves up.  (of course, it’s still a fitness product company, they only went so far).

Anyway – It shipped last week, and the UPS tracker claims that it should show up tomorrow.

Excited for new numbers!

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