Antranik’s Counting Calories

I’m about 2 weeks into doing some­thing I’ve never done before: Count­ing my calories.

Early on I real­ized I eat about 2,500 calo­ries a day and eas­ily go over 3,000.

When I first poured 1 serv­ing of cereal into a mea­sur­ing cup to see what 1 cup was like, I real­ized I eat many serv­ings of cereal in the morning.

Good thing I’m extremely active!  If I wasn’t, I’d def­i­nitely be rack­ing on the fat, espe­cially for my age (nearly 30 baby!).  I real­ized my metab­o­lism has been drop­ping con­sid­er­ably since the age of 25.  I’ve been eat­ing A LOT, espe­cially on the days right after an intense bike ride.

I’ve decided to cur­tail my intake of calo­ries and see where that takes me.  Calo­rie count­ing has opened my eyes into under­stand­ing that…

a) I do a con­sid­er­able amount of snack­ing between meals and all that adds up.
b) Fill­ing my plate com­pletely is way more food than nec­es­sary.
b) I love dark choco­late cov­ered almonds.
c) Eat­ing less than you’re used to for the first few days makes you cranky and your extrem­i­ties will feel cold. (Thank­fully that was very tem­po­rary).
d) Eat­ing less makes you poop a lot less. (Sci­ence!)
e) Eat­ing slowly is very grat­i­fy­ing.
f) And last, we Amer­i­cans, OVEREAT LIKE MOTHER FUCKERS.

So any­way, I’m about 2 weeks into this.  MyFit­ness­Pal has been the com­bi­na­tion iPhone app/website I’ve been using to record every­thing.  As tedious as calorie-counting is, that app makes every­thing super easy.  If the food I’m eat­ing is not home-made and has a bar­code, I could just scan the bar code and put the # of servings.

Pro­tip for any­one using MyFit­ness­Pal: I often take my lunch with me from home and I log all these things early in the morn­ing that I know I’ll be *even­tu­ally* eat­ing, so I don’t have to tediously record it again. Also if I have some­thing like… say, a candy bar or a sand­wich and I only eat half of it, but I know I’m going to eat the other half later, I sim­ply record that I ate the full thing from the get-go so I don’t have to enter it twice. This helps makes every­thing a lot more stream­lined and efficient.

What are my goals? I don’t have any numer­i­cal goal as I don’t even have a scale and frankly don’t care about my actual weight because I’m not over­weight to begin with.  Body mea­sure­ments are more impor­tant to me than weight so I wrapped a cloth mea­sur­ing tape around my thighs (24″), waist (34″) and hips (35.5″).  I’ll see what it’s like every few weeks I suppose.

I’m just going to do this until I feel like I’m a lit­tle bit leaner and lighter.   Hope­fully by then I’ll have a very good idea of what <2,000 calo­ries really feels like because I sure as hell under­es­ti­mate it at the moment.  I will con­tinue my yoga prac­tice and hope­fully with time my giant thighs won’t be as giant and inver­sions will be less tricky as well.

 

UPDATE:

So over 7 weeks of log­ging caloric intake and check­ing the scale, I’m able to fig­ure out my real basal meta­bolic rate with the exer­cise I reg­u­larly do. To main­tain my cur­rent weight with the exer­cise reg­i­men I cur­rently do, I should con­sume 2,230 calories.

This is how I fig­ured this out…

MyFit­ness­Pal cal­cu­lated orig­i­nally that my Caloric Intake (with 2lb loss per week; 1000 calo­rie deficit per day) should be at 1620.

Over 7 weeks time, I aver­aged out to that fig­ure almost to a tee (just 500cal less than the goal).

If 3,500cal are one pound then 500cal means 0.15lbs so it’s insignificant.

7 weeks expected loss = 14lbs
7 weeks actual loss = 10lbs
Expected vs actual diff = –4lbs

Calo­ries of error over the 7 weeks = 4*3,500 = 14,000 calo­ries
Calo­ries of error per day = 14,000cal/49days= 285 calories

Cor­rected tar­get intake los­ing 2lb/week (1000 calo­rie daily deficit) = 1620 – 285 = 1335

So this would mean my daily main­te­nance calo­rie intake is 2,335. (1,335+1,000)

COOL!!!