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?
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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!
