The other half of "diet and exercise"

Last Saturday's six-miler was a little bit disconcerting in that I started "hitting the wall" around 4.5 miles. My eating habits were really screwed up the prior two days which was probably the root cause. I'd been on a fast-and-binge cycle, especially on Friday. Saturday morning before the run I ate too big a breakfast hoping to "catch up" on my food and instead it caught up to me.

So here we are a month and a half into my training program and my weight has only shown a modest decrease of a couple of pounds. Sure, my tummy felt a little bit trimmer but mainly due to a tighter stomach muscle. In fact, I'd gained a couple of pounds last week likely because of my Friday binges. I threw out my old analog bathroom scale (which I never trusted because the dial never returned to zero reliably) and got a gleaming new digital scale accurate to fifths of a pound. When I stepped on it, I discovered I was a whopping 200 pounds! It was surely high time to start working on the other half of the "diet and exercise" equation. Incidentally, last week's pre-run seminar was on nutrition and we got some helpful hints on eating right. They gave us some information on USA Eat Fit which offers a basic subscription with a calorie-tracking journal, and for a higher premium adds personal dietary advice for a higher premium. I opted to go for the basic subscription.

To start, the calorie-tracking journal asks for my current weight and weight goal, and suggests several time horizons for achieving that goal. Then it calculates how many net calories I need to limit myself to each day to reach that goal in the given time frame. It becomes apparent just from crunching the numbers why it's so difficult to lose weight. For my personal analysis (slimming down to my college weight of 165 pounds), here's what the calculator came up with:

• Losing one pound requires burning 3,500 calories.
• Therefore, to lose my goal of 35 pounds requires burning 35×3,500 = 122,500 calories more than I consume.
• My body burns 2,581 calories in one day. This is how much I'd be allowed to eat to maintain my current weight.
• Losing 35 pounds in 21 weeks (146 days) means eating 122,500/146 = 839 calories per day less than this amount.
• This means I would have to consume no more than 2,581–839 = 1,742 calories per day to reach my target weight.

You've got to be kidding! Only 1,742 calories?! Good lord, you can order a #1 meal at In-N-Out Burger and you're already talking 1,070 calories (and that's with the Diet Coke)! Go to Costco and munch on a few food samplers and you've consumed 150 calories right there. Plus consider I'd regularly eat more than the baseline 2,581 and it's easy to see, even with lots of dancing and lots of running, why the bathroom scale wasn't behaving the way I wanted it to.

Now it's glaringly clear in hard numbers why exercise is so important to weight loss – only rabbits and supermodels could limit themselves to 1,700 calories a day! Each mile of running burns about 125 calories and at my pace this comes out to about 10 calories per minute. This means that my 40-minute run today will burn about 400 calories, good enough for an extra Polish sausage or, more practically speaking, an extra Healthy Choice entrée. Those 400 calories come in handy when you're craving munchies or are used to eating a lot of food.

So now I'm using the calorie tracker at USA Eat Fit to figure out where to cut my bingeing and it's been pretty useful so far. It divides the total calories between breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks. It adds to your daily allowance whenever you exercise. I've been able to see how cheeseburgers, French fries and pizza slices upset the overall calorie total in my daily diet. It has a database of common foods, plus you can add custom ones. Something I wish it could do is automatically roll over your "calorie bank" (the difference between your budget and what you actually consume) from day to day – then I could easily save up for that 16-ounce T-bone! (I'm sure there are other calorie counters that can do this.) Right now I work around this by adding a "fake" custom food called "POSITIVE calorie balance" to my personal list. Thankfully it allows you to input either positive or negative values into the calorie field. Of course, just in case, I've also added "NEGATIVE calorie balance" to my custom list.

A few other things I've learned so far:

• If you must have breakfast meat, opt for ham or bacon, not sausage.
• You can easily ingest 200 calories just munching on food samples at Costco!
• Hurray! Vietnamese food is great for feeling full with minimum calories ... but it's loaded with sodium.
• Actually, just about every pre-packaged food product out there is loaded with sodium. Will I have to give up convenience to reduce my sodium intake? On the other hand, I've lived this long without watching my sodium intake and my blood pressure is still 112/68, so maybe I don't have to worry too much.
• Eating at Subway really is a good way to lose weight!

So here I go ... my first truly analytical venture at what it will take for me to lose real weight and keep it off. Look for blog entries on both my weight-loss and my distance progress in the coming months. Onward and ... um, downward!