100 Days

What I ate today

Breakfast (11 a.m.)
2-3 servings of Special K (spilled ¾ of the first bowl on the carpet. Dumb schmuck)
2-3 servings of skim milk
Calories (3 servings of each to be safe): 600 (probably lower)
Fat: 0 grams

Lunch (2:30 p.m.)
2 slices of multi grain bread
2 ounces of turkey
2 ounces of roast beef
1 serving of fat free mayo
Calories: 255
Fat: 5 grams

Dinner (6 p.m.)
1 foot long Subway chicken breast sandwich
Calories: 640
Fat: 10 grams

Desert (6:20 p.m.)
2 Special K cereal bars (so fucking good. I probably can never buy them again. I am separating these from dinner to make myself feel better)
Calories: 180
Fat: 3 grams

Snack (9 p.m.)
2 servings of baby carrots
Calories: 70
Fat: 0 grams

Total calories: 1,745 (probably less)
Total Fat: 18 grams

Exercise: 45 minutes on elliptical machine, burned 830 calories.

My old roommate Brendan will probably leave a post telling me I shouldn’t do this, but a fat guy only gets so much satisfaction from dieting. He’s got to find the joy when he can, especially if he polished off 800 calories at dinner.

But if you take the roughly 1,745 calories I ate today and subtract the 830 calories I burned on a fairly intense elliptical workout, you get 915 calories. If I go to my online calorie burning calculator and put in my stats as a “moderately active” 26 year old male standing 6-3 and weighing 319 (my new weight as of today) it says I burn 4,243 calories per day. I am thinking that is just from sitting around, and not with any e, and not with any excise At least that’s what we are going with for now.

So what does that mean? That means that the caloric difference for the day was 3,328 calories. How accurate is that number? How the fuck should I know? What I do know, is that I think this was a pretty good day all around. So there ya go.

Saturday, not so much. Although I stayed within my new rules of cheating.

The new rules, well actually one rule, is this: I will eat no fast food, pizza, fatty things at restaurants and nothing that, in general, I know is stupid (like spaghetti and meatballs or macaroni and cheese). Basically, if I am going to cheat, it’s got to be with food that I would actually eat if I wasn’t cheating.

After the pizza on Thursday, I decided that I at least had to make an effort to keep the occasional slip ups within reason. It’s one thing to screw up by eating too much roast beef in a day. It’s another thing to screw up by eating too many double cheeseburgers in a day.

Saturday I went to evil Wal-Mart for some shopping. A large box caught my eye, it was chicken fajita mix. It had 230 calories and three grams of fat per serving. I thought it was perfect. So I decided that fajitas would be my dinner. All I needed was tortillas (although, I very easily could have skipped the tortillas and just had the chicken, but I’m not that smart.) I looked around for the tortillas that would do the least amount of damage. I found them in some concoction that was 90 calories and one gram of fat for two. I got those. I ate the whole freaking thing. The entire box of chicken with six or seven tortillas. After I was done, I tried out the new Special K snack bars I got. I was hooked. At only 90 calories and 1.5 grams of fat per bar, they might be perfect. However, I liked them so much, I had to have another. And then later on I had another one.

Some unofficial calculations in my head bring the estimated number of calories to just under 3,000 for the day. Was it cheating? Yes. But was it sill under the amount of calories I usually burn in a day? Yes. So do you see how this works? If I cheat, then I have to do it within reason. If I had gotten another pizza Saturday, that would have been, what, 4,000 calories? I don’t even know how many calories are in a large pizza. But I figure that I saved myself at least 1,500 calories by eating what I did. Still, I probably shouldn’t lean too hard on that method of cheating. That could lead to more cheating and that would be bad.

Of course, there was a downside to fajita night. I think I’m constipated. Now, I’ve never been constipated before, so I don’t know what it feels like, but, well, you know.

But it’s all about being sensible. It makes no sense at all to shackle yourself up in a diet. As reader Liz said in a comment earlier, that’s how you fail. If a man wants fajitas, he should have fajitas (though, they weren’t that good). But you always have to be thinking, always have to be on your toes. You have to know your options and know that you don’t have to make the worst choice possible just because you are giving yourself a break.

This is all just a further explanation of my theory about the difference between Cheating and Blowing the Whole Fucking Thing Up. So this is nothing new to me, except that maybe I am learning that I have to actually apply these theories to make them work.

And it did work, sort of. I’m down two pounds since Wednesday. So if you were wondering why I was so excited about losing 50 pounds when I actually lost 49, its time to shut up, because now it’s 51.

And counting.