Can You?

Circumstances caused me to break down and visit a McDonald's restaurant for lunch today.

I haven't been to a McD's, Wendy's, BK, or Dunkin Donuts for months. It's beginning to be where I can't stand the food. When Little Man in the backseat started whining for lunch and stood his ground on "french fries...and chicken nuggets", I came up with a plan: swing past the chicken wing place, grab some wings and fries and then tell the midget that wings are nuggets. It woulda worked just fine except we pulled into the lot and --- they were closed!  McD's it is, then.

Now keep in mind that, for the past several months, meals have been healthy and home-made. Calories have been watched (and restricted when needed). I've been exercising five or six days a week and have dropped to a weight of 202 (199.5 one day!). Healthy living has been good - and I feel good.

Until.....

I ate thirty chicken nuggets and a medium fries for lunch.

Damn.

Only spin that I can put on that one is " Hey! Look! I can eat thirty chicken nuggets at once!

Can you?



You Eat HOW MANY Calories?!

Almost a year since the last post....well, if you think that it's hard to find time to exercise, you'd find that it's very hard to find time to write about exercise.

Health and fitness experts are always giving recommendations on how many calories a person should consume in a day. There are different suggestions based on whether you're trying to lose weight, gain muscle, or even just maintain your current weight. I've been stuck at the same weight (209 lbs) for almost a year. (Not really "stuck" - if I really wanted to do it, I could exercise much more seriously and drop weight quickly....but, in my world, there's always a piece of cake that needs eating just about every day!) Curious about how many calories I eat each day, I started a food log. Ready to laugh, cry, and possibly even recoil in horror at what I consume in a day?

--

For starters, here are the calorie counts:

March 19 - 2391 calories

March 20 - 2821 calories

March 21 - 2808

March 22 - 3280

March 23 - 2434

March 24 - 2945

March 25 - 3190

March 26 - stopped counting at 1010: the number was going up too fast to track!

March 27 - Did not count. Food log entry reads: "BAD"

March 28 - 2147

March 29 - 2252

March 30 - 3150

April 2 - 2380

April 3 - 2410

Not too terribly bad for a 209 lbs. active male...It does explain why my weight is standing steady - if I wanted to lose, I should be somewhere around 2000 calories every day - especially since I haven't been exercising for a few months.

Now, for the sad, sad part: On every single day's log entry, there is a candy bar(Milky Way!) or ice cream, or cake....those are the things that add 200 to 800 calories to the total in mere seconds. And I can't imagine life without them!

Actually, I can imagine life without them - as I continue to record my daily calorie intake, start to exercise again, and think about seriously losing ten more pounds (yup! - need a goal to work towards in the year before my next post!), it seems that sweets are the easiest place to cut the calories. We eat fairly healthy home-cooked meals, I don't drink much soda (too busy slugging down coffee - black), and chips/snacks aren't really my thing. It's the sweets, dammit!

Maybe keeping track of daily calories will help me get them down; maybe more exercise will lessen the effects of excess calories. The fun part might really be when I start tracking carbs/protein/fat. Might be eye-opening to see on paper how many calories in fat that each of those little candy bars carry!