Changes

I have been forging ahead with my comparably spartan diet the last few weeks.  I've made a complete overhaul of my eating habits and so far it seems to be going well.
 
The first big change is not eating lunch at fast food chains or the China Buffet for lunch.  This is actually a pretty big deal, I'm sure if you think about all the stuff in a Chinese restaurant, hardly any of it would fall under the label of healthy.  I kind of miss it since I would often take a book with me and read while I munched on fried and sweetly sauced chicken bits.  I was even thinking the really super friendly lady who works there and always wants to know what my new book is about might be worried about me.  Instead I pack a few things, and read at the office or take a walk around the dump.

The second, is that most nights I would end up going to Wendy's or McDonald's since both of them are within walking distance of my house.  Of course I never walked to them, but the mere existence of the possibility that I could have walked somehow lessened the mental liability of ordering a grease burger and fries with a bonus junior-sized bacon cheeseburger as a snack for later.  You also often find that you need a box of nuggets for the ride home, as short as it may be.  So right there, avoiding all of that mess, I'm sure my intestines and arteries have become much happier.

Thirdly,  I have started a log of my caloric intake.  It's pretty simple and pretty much I just come up with a daily total.  There are plenty of websites that you can use to figure out your basel metabolic rate (BMR), i.e. how many calories your body uses each day.   I looked at quite a few and they all give back slightly different numbers, and everyone's bodies will be different so at the very best these can only be a guideline anyway.  The point however is that if you eat less calories than your BMR your body will make up the difference by consuming your calorie stores, i.e. your gross fat.  Of course you don't want to go too far, if you reduce your caloric intake too drastically your body will think you are starving and will adjust your BMR to compensate and may even take the calories from the places where you might want a bit of heft, like your muscles.

The math looks something like this:  a pound of fat weights, well a pound, but in that pound is stored about 3500 calories of energy.  So basically you have to create a 3500 caloric deficit in your diet to lose that pound bulging out around your belly.   Visually it is apparent that I have had an enormous surplus and have been slowly storing those calories away for a harsh winter like a blubbery skinned bear preparing for a long hibernation.  And if you really think about it you really don't have to over eat much to gain a lot of weight over the years.  A spoonful of peanut butter is about 200 calories.  If you ate just that extra spoonful of peanut butter a day more than your body really needed after a month you would be inching up on being 2 pounds fatter than you started the month.  Over a year...  yeah, it's pretty scary.

In practice keeping the log helps keep me aware of what I'm eating and encourages me to make better choices.  For example, if I want a snack, I could eat a bag of chips and not really be full, or have a banana.  The banana having something like 125 calories and some vitamins and dietary fiber compared to the chips having 600 calories and being nutritionally worthless.

  There are the days where I might still go out to eat for the sake of a hot date, so the appearance of a shrimp curry, or a chicken burrito might appear on the list still.  The cool thing is that researching those types of things leads you to start making different choices. If you happen to go back to you favorite overly giant burrito place to eat you might do things differently.  I learned that a burrito in the wheat shell with grilled chicken has a few hundred calories less than the blackened version in a flour wrap, not something you would normally think about, but over a month those calories are going somewhere.


An Awesome side effect is that I'm rediscovering my love of cooking.  I think it has something to do with the correlation between the kitchen and the lab of the mad scientist.  There are bubbling liquids, strange powders and extracts, formulas and recipes, the mixing of ingredients and the use of really cool gadgets.  Hopefully in the kitchen one never ends up yelling, "It's alive, it's alive!"   Seriously though, there is something relaxing and satisfying about eying your pantry and creating something tasty and healthy from it's contents.