Brandon Fuller

Calories

As mentioned, I have been counting calories — meaning I write down what I burn and what I consume. I have done no modifications to my diet during this period. I still ate what I normally would. I just observed. The goal was to understand my caloric intake a bit better. How much fuel does that meal give me for an hour run? Let’s find out.

Some items that you should be aware of:

• I used a tool called MyPlate at livestrong.com. Its free for 45 days of rolling data. They have an iPhone app too for $3 that I bought. I thought that would come in handy but wasn’t as much. Easier to do the full analysis once per day back in front of the computer at night.
• Eating at small non-chain places is brutal for this process. The local Italian place and Snarf’s (sub shop) we go to has no nutritional information available. They aren’t “bad” places as far as the nutrition goes but I can’t tell what I am eating. For those, I had to substitute in something I thought was comparable but it could be way off. For instance, I used Subway’s turkey sub instead of Snarf’s. This made me gravitate towards wanting to eat things that had numbers.
• Eating at home takes more work. When Kim would prepare a meal, I would have to type in all the ingredients, measure out portions, and record an approximate. The MyPlate tool helps you do this nicely and records the meal so you can reuse it later or share it.
• I let Garmin tell me how many calories I burned each workout and I guarantee it isn’t right. It just uses some generic formulas. We are all different. Newer HR monitors take your HR into consideration when calculating calories burnt. My watch does not. It is only time and distance.

So here is the chart that I plotted out for the time period:

Calorie Goal: The tool sets this based on how much weight you want to lose. I put in that I wanted to maintain my weight at 145. This gave me a daily baseline on what I could eat if I just sat still. You could pick your daily activity level which I set at sedentary/office worker. Your workouts aren’t in this. My number was 2054.

Calories Consumed: The blue line was what I ate day to day. The average was 2693. So 600+ above what I could consume a day with no exercise.

Calories Burned: I had a 3 day dip to 0 during surgery. Liken those to normal rest days. Thought it would be good to see if I overate on those days. Average was 1323 not counting those 3 rest days.

Net Calories: The big money! My number was 1603. Remember the goal was 2054 in order to maintain my weight. So this says I was 451 calories short on average per day. If I changed my goal to lose a pound a week, the daily calorie goal is 1554. Just below what I was putting down. So my guess is that my deficit was causing me to burn about 3/4 pound a week.

Did that line up? No. I haven’t lost any weight. I am hovering (frustrating!) quite nicely at this weight. I see dips through the week but I haven’t seen anything I would call a trend.

I am not out to lose massive weight right now but dropping a fraction of a pound a week sounds good to me. Over the course of a season/cycle, I should see a dip then. I hope to get into the 130s at some point and then hold that for the rest of my adult life.

The other thing the tool does is give you daily breakdowns. Here is a random day so you can see. I am not smart enough yet to know how to manage this. That would be a whole new dimension. Getting the calories but making sure they are the right breakdown.

Conclusions:

• If you really want to track calories, specifically calories burned, you need a method that uses HR to help make the data more accurate. Otherwise, you are not going to accurately know what you burnt. If you are trying to lose small amounts of weight per week, the inaccuracy of the numbers will factor in and frustrate you.
• There is no possible way for a person to lose weight if you don’t exercise. Oh, I know that’s not true. But looking at my calorie intake — small breakfast (200 calories) and controlling portions, it wasn’t enough to get under my calorie goal for the day. A “normal” lunch and dinner blows you out of the water. And you haven’t had a snack! So if you want to lose weight happily, exercise. Run. It is the biggest bang for the buck around. It litterly gets you an entire meal and a snack.
• Counting calories is easier than it used to be but still is tough unless you live by things you can measure.
• I was under my FDA fiber every day by 50%.
• I am under-eating — just slightly. A GU (100 calories) and a Gatorade (200 calories) per run would top me off. I need to get better about eating pre and post run. Not a huge amount but making sure I am replacing the calories right after the workout.

Not sure if I am going to continue logging. It is easy but I am not going to collect data just to collect data. I got the picture of how I am right now. That is what I was after and I learned a lesson and will make a small change. Otherwise, unless there is other big no-no’s in this, I have other areas that I can spend time in for improvement.

Thoughts?