August 27th

August 27th
 

Diet Compliance: Today was my highest calorie day since I started this blog. 2600 cals, which isn't a disaster, but definitely high. The high number was the result of a date with my wife, which included dinner. Like yesterday, the plan was to only eat that dinner and nothing else, but dangit if the ol' hungries didn't hit about six hours later (I would have had a much better day if I was able to resist the hunger monster at midnight- this is why my usual plan works so much better: I have that "baked in," with the protein shake then. It's harder to do when you allow yourself a higher calorie initial meal at 6pm. As a reminder, my plan is intermittent fasting with a window for eating from 6pm-12am).

See comments for more excuses, er, explanation.

Exercise Compliance: 10k steps attained again.Thank goodness.

Measurements Weight: -.2
Measurements Chest:  -.5"
Measurements Waist: -.5"

Comment:Back to -2 lbs lost this morning, which was not alarming nor a surprise. Re: high cals, in theory 2600 cals should actually be fine for long term weight loss, if I'm actually doing 10k steps. If you trust the calculators out there, I ate 2600 cals while burning 3250, a difference of -650 cals.

Let's extrapolate that. -650 x 7 days = -4550. This is well above the required -3500 calories required to lose one pound. So if I ate deep dish pizza to the tune of 2600 calories per day (or insert other food), and walked those 10k steps, well, gosh, I'd be fine and dandy.

Except I know from personal experience that this doesn't work. Well, ok, yes, it does work, in as much as thermodynamics is inescapable. However, what doesn't work about it are a bunch of factors:

1. The burn rate of 3250 is based on an estimate and may not reflect my actual burn. It could be off significantly, and if it is, it would surely be off downwards.

2. From a psychology standpoint, it's never worked for me to sort of just skim the absolute bare minimum in terms of calorie restriction. Like most fallible people, I'm prone to the ol' "whatever the limit is, fudge it by X amount." So if I made my target something like 2100-2600 cals, knowing that I would probably be losing more than 1 pound per week, I can assure you that a blog post like this would be talking about hitting 2800, 2900, or 3000 calories on a "bad" day like this. "Oh, it's ok, I still am -250 calories in the hole!" I would say.

3. Finally, another big assumption: am I using a bomb calorimeter at home? Haha, nope. In other words, I "think" I've eaten 2600 calories because I am at the mercy of other people who did this work. Who the heck knows how accurate various restaurant and nutrition package labels really are? Restaurant food in particular is tricky because preparation will vary. So in other words, you don't want to be getting too close to your daily calorie burn because maybe that 400 calorie side of rice is really 700. You just don't know.

All this is just a long winded way of saying: this was OK for a special date night with the wife, but should not be a daily occurrence. But one more thing I know won't work either: "cheating" because I feel bad about the high calorie count, and "dumping some calories onto the next day." OMG DO NOT DO THIS. It'll cause days and days of cheating like this, and finally a calorie blowout. Nope, just accept that today was not optimal, and start fresh. Always. Start. Fresh.