Greg's Running Blog

It’s almost over! My marathon training plan is coming to an end and I will get a chance to test my endurance abilities. For the past 17+ weeks I have been following Hal Higdon’s Advanced Marathon training plan and in 4 days I’ll be running the inaugural Tyler Rose Marathon in Tyler, Texas on 10/10/10. It is the same day most people will travel to Chicago to run the same distance.

I chose a “local”, if you consider driving 3 hours and staying in a hotel overnight local, race as I wanted something that didn’t cost an arm and a leg to fly to and I was also looking for a marathon that was not too crowded as I will be running to finish with a Boston Qualifying time or better. Boston Qualifying time for me means running a marathon under 3:10:59 which means running it faster than 7:17 minutes/mile. If I look at my recent training runs I would say I have this in the bag and running a 7:17 would mean I’m sandbagging it. Given my recent race results I should be shooting for something closer to the 3 hour mark, a 6:52/mile pace. But I don’t think there is anything sandbagging about running a marathon.

During the last couple of weeks of taper my mind was going 100 miles an hour to decide on a marathon pace. “Should I play it safe and run 7:15 pace? Should I go balls to the wall and attempt a sub 3 marathon that I’m theoretically capable of? Should I go with something in between?” This is what they call taper madness. Not only I’m running less and less but I have all this time to keep thinking and playing different, both realistic and unrealistic scenarios in my head about how to run the marathon. I have also been checking the weather information for Tyler and it’s not looking all that great.

Right now it looks like the race will start in the mid 50s and temperatures will rise to closer to mid 70s by the end of the race. I also finally came to my senses and asked the most important question from myself: “What’s my goal with this race?”. And the answer to that question is that I want to qualify for Boston. It takes 7:15 to qualify so there is really no point in me attempting to pull off a sub 3 marathon at this point. I will have plenty other times to achieve that goal. So I finally decided that I will play it safe and I will run 7:10 pace up until the 20 mile mark at which point I will re-evaluate how I feel and whether I should attempt to run anything faster than that for the last 6 miles. If I can pick up the pace great if I can’t I still have a BQ finish in my sight as long as I keep my pace above 7:30 for the last 6.2 miles.

The only other thing that kept my mind preoccupied for the last two weeks was nutrition and weight gain. I cut back on my breakfast, I’m only eating 200 calories instead of my usual 400 calories. I also try to cut back on the snacks and eat only 100 calorie snacks instead of the 200 calorie ones. As of today I’m also starting my carb-up plan. I’m going easier on the protein and fats and trying to consume more carbohydrates. So far I think I have my weight under control but it is definitely a balancing act to get things right. Don’t eat too much but eat enough to fuel my body just right and keep my glycogen stores full.

So that’s pretty much what taper madness feels like. If you think this post was just a jumble of thoughts, it is not much different from the actual state of my mind where ideas and scenarios just keep going in full circle. I’m really looking forward Sunday morning when I can finally put and end to this madness and just go out and run.

I’ve been neglecting my blog for the past several weeks. I run a lot, I tweet a lot but I just can’t get my act together to put a blog post up if my life depended on it. Maybe I should do short and sweet blog posts that don’t take more than 30 minutes to whip together instead of trying to concentrate on writing long and winding ones which no one reads anyway.

In my last post I wrote:

So how did I do in terms of Diet? Well let’s just say that weight management and all inclusive resorts with all you can eat buffets don’t mix too well and I think I’ll need to write another blog post about that one…

And “Jim” posted a comment on my blog saying:

Tweets are boring. Let us know how all this training is impacting on your weight now that you have fallen off the chuck wagon —- so to speak! It is always my major problem and I am interested to see whether you are coping better than I do. I am sure others are too!

So I think I owe an update on how my training is impacting my weight. Last time I blogged about my weight I was down to 164.8 lbs (74.7 kg) after a month of not counting calories and eating healthy. That was 2.5 months ago. Since then I have been training for a marathon, running a lot of miles, some weeks over 50, I traveled to Europe and ate a lot of garbage while I was there. I not only quit counting calories I also quit weighing myself while I was in Europe.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a picture (chart) of what happened to my weight in the past two and a half months:

Holy smokes Batman! Despite burning calories at an alarming rate my weight has not been doing as well as I would have hoped. The gap in the chart shows my European vacation and you can see the sudden climb in the average weight as soon as I returned and stepped on the scale. I gained about 3 lbs (1.3 kg) in two weeks while I was on vacation. That means a 750 calorie daily surplus! If you consider that I needed to eat about 2,600 calories a day just to maintain my weight it means I was eating over 3,300 calories a day while on vacation. Knowing what I did I find it not at all surprising that I have gained all that weight and ate all that much food while I was there. All inclusive, all you can eat and drink, resorts are bad for the waistline.

Once I came back from my trip I have been trying to maintain my weight with more or less success. I’m currently sitting on a 168.7 lbs (76.5 kg) rolling average which is still 4 lbs higher than my all time low of 164.6 that I reached at the end of July. I don’t think I’m on a runaway train by any means but I know that I will have to make a more diligent effort at keeping my food intake in check and keeping my calorie intake in line with my caloric expenditure.

During my transformation I’ve been getting a lot of comments and a lot of questions. One of the most annoying one has been “So when are you going to be done with your diet?”. But nothing really tops the ultimate question that I get more times than I could care to count: “What’s your secret?”. This question is probably the most annoying of them all. Don’t misunderstand me, I love to get compliments and I certainly don’t mind questions and I’m eager to help anyone who’s in need of help with their transformation to a better and healthier life. But when I get this question, the most amazing thing usually happens. The person asking the question already knows the answer to it:

Eat Less Move More

There is no secret! It really comes down to one very simple thing: to lose weight you have to generate a caloric deficit. There are two ways of generating that caloric deficit.

1. Eat Less
   By reducing your caloric intake yet maintaining caloric demand your body will be in a caloric deficit and it will have to come up with the energy from some other source besides food. And most of us have plenty of storage to rely on. Our fat cells are excellent energy stores, they store about 3,500 calories of energy per lbs of body fat. So by eating less your body will start to burn off all the excess fat and slowly but surely your waistline will start to dwindle.
2. Move More
   The other way of generating a caloric deficit is by increasing the caloric demand of your body. Caloric demand of your body depends on age, sex, weight and activity level. The older you get the lower the caloric demand so the sooner you start the better off you are. It is pretty tough to change your sex, I’m not really sure it’s worth it, and the lower your weight the less energy you use so that really leaves us with one option to increase caloric demand which is increasing your activity level. Unless you quit your desk job and start loading trains or stocking warehouse shelves you really have no other option but start an exercise regime. It can be as little as 30 minutes of walking in the evenings after dinner or as much as a full fledged marathon training running 35+ miles a week. As long as you increase your activity level slowly but surely your waistline will start to dwindle.

And that’s all there is to it! As long as you do either one, or for optimal results both, you will lose weight. And the person who just asked the question while gets a bit disappointed that there was no secret involved, no pixie dust, no gastric bypass surgery, no magic drugs, no quick fix deep down inside they already knew that the only way to shed the fat and keep it off is by eating less and moving more.

I’ve been losing weight, mostly fat, for the last 7+ months and I feel like I’m in the home stretch. I have lost 70+ lbs and I think I only have another 10 lbs to go. But this last 10lbs seems to be the toughest to lose. Why’s that?

I see a lot of people are fighting to lose that “last 5-10 lbs” and quite honestly most people could probably stand to lose that last 5-10lbs whether they admit to it or not. Even at my half marathon race most guys I have talked to said “If I could only lose that 10 lbs my time would improve so much!”. Yet, for some reason, they’re stuck at their weight. They run a lot of miles I presume, it’s tough to run a half marathon without running a lot of miles and they still can’t shake that last 10 lbs. I think I know why it is so difficult to drop that final 10 lbs and to be able to tighten the belt one more notch.

1. Weight loss fatigue.
   I’ve been losing weight for over 7 months. It is a very tiring process even in light of all the progress I have made. Counting calories for days on, writing down every single item I consume, worry every time the family goes out for dinner what I would eat and wondering just how many days having a slice of birthday cake and a beer with the friends would set me back can be a full time job. And after a while you reach a point in your weight loss where you get tired of it and you say “screw it, I deserve that piece of cake” or “I’m not going to count calories today”. I know that I’m pretty tired of it all myself, I even quit calorie counting completely a week ago. But with getting more and more relaxed with the diet comes the other problem.
2. Diet Complacency
   When you do something long enough you begin to master it. When you’ve been dieting for so long you start to learn how many calories are in a large egg (70) how much calorie is in a cup of rice (about 200-220) and how big is a 4oz portion of chicken (about the size of a deck of cards). These things start to become second nature. You feel like you’re in the groove and you’re in full control. But then you start to justify some not so perfect choices and you start to eat some things you know you shouldn’t. You would know that eating that third tortilla (140 calories) is probably not a good idea and it does not really fit into your caloric budget but you do it anyway because “I’ve already ran 4 miles this morning and that burned 400 calories”. You will look at the loaf of bread at the Italian restaurant on a Saturday night and you will think “I’m going to run my 10 mile long run burning 1,000 calories, what’s the harm in eating 300 extra calories tonight? I’m just carb loading for tomorrow”. You start justifying diet choices and rationalizing excess calories that you wouldn’t eat had you still been calorie counting. Combined with the weight loss fatigue you feel downright entitled to that piece of brownie “I’ve been dieting this long, I deserve that brownie!”. So you end up eating a 100 calories here another 100 calories there and before you know it you just ate an extra 200-300 calories on top of your daily budget. And that is a big issue when you combine it with the third issue.
3. Change in Basal Metabolic Rate
   It is no secret that the bigger is someone the more calories it takes to support that body. There are equations that can estimate your basal metabolic rate (BMR) or resting metabolic rate (RMR). In the different calculators weight is one of the determining factors for BMR/RMR and it takes around 5 calories per lbs of body weight to maintain such weight. There are other factors involved, such as sex, age, height and how active a person is but weight is has an effect of about 5 calories per lbs of body weight. So if someone loses 10 lbs their basal metabolic rate would drop by 50 calories. Now 50 calories a day is not much. But I lost 70+ lbs which means my basal metabolic rate has dropped by over 350 calories. So if I started with a basal metabolic rate of 2,400 calories at 237 lbs now, at 165 lbs, my basal metabolic rate is down to almost 2,000 calories. So if I keep staying on my 1,800 calorie diet instead of generating a 600 calorie daily deficit, which would produce a nice 1.5 lbs weekly weight loss, I’m only generating a 200 calorie daily deficit even though I’m not doing anything different than I did at the beginning of my diet. If I would want to maintain the same rate of weight loss that I had at the beginning I would have to reduce my calories to about 1,400 calories a day. That is a huge difference!

So if you combine the fact that you’re only generating a 200 calorie deficit with an 1,800 calorie diet and that you’re complacency eating an excess 200 calories daily you can see how you can end up just maintaining your current weight and not losing any more even though, with the exception of the small indulgences, you are eating the same thing that you have been eating for the past 7 months. This can be a very depressing situation where you feel like you will never reach your goal and as if someone just keeps moving the finish line further and further. So what am I doing to make sure I don’t hit this plateau?

Nothing. I’m actually so close to my goal that I don’t care that I’m not getting there within the next two weeks. I’m taking a conscious break from my weight loss and I’m concentrating on other things. I’m focusing on my running goals and training while still eating healthy foods and making healthy choices. I’m paying attention to what I eat and I’m trying to maintain my weight without the daily drag of calorie counting. I’m hoping to be able to maintain my current weight and current physique without worrying about food. I’m trying to enjoy myself without getting fat again. And once I succeed in that I might concentrate on losing that last 10 lbs.

This week I’m flying solo. I have been tracking my calories for over 230 days. I wrote down every single food item I have consumed and every single calorie that made it into my mouth. This is a very tedious process and aggravates the hell out of my wife when I get up from the dinner table to rush to the computer to enter the grams of rice I spooned over to my plate and the amount of vegetables that I placed next to it. But I have been doing it because it worked.

If I look at my progress for the past 7 months I can safely say that a large portion of my success can be attributed to my very diligent calorie tracking and sticking with the plan without deviation. Every week my weight loss matched my expected loss based on the amount of calories I took in and the amount of calories I burned via exercise. Everything worked like clockwork. But I had to ask myself this question: “Do I want to count every single calorie for the rest of my life to maintain my healthy physique?” And the andwer to this question is “No, I don’t!”

So this week I have decided to ditch the kitchen scale and Cron-o-Meter and start winging it. I can’t be sure just yet how well this new approach is going to work for me but I sure hope it’ll be a success as I want to live my life as a normal person not someone with a severe OCD who needs to write down every single calorie. This week might not have been the perfect week to go without my trusty measuring system as my mileage will be pretty low this week due to taking two rest days for pre-race taper but if I can’t do it now then I need to go back to the drawing board and reevaluate just what it is that I’m doing wrong.

So far I have confidence in myself, I’m not doing anything unusual or out of the ordinary and I’m still counting calories in my mind and I’m still trying to maintain my 2,300 calorie diet in my head. Whether I’m succeeding or failing at it will be revealed in a couple of weeks.

Today was the last day of my son’s soccer camp and for the past four days I’ve been eating lunch with him at various places. Monday we went to McDonald’s, a place where he’s only been about 3 times in his entire life. Tuesday I took him to my favorite lunch spot, a Thai restaurant where he had his very first Pad Thai and he liked it a lot. Wednesday we went to another favorite of mine, Chipotle, and he got a taste of their chicken quesadillas. For some reason today he said he wanted to eat Chick-fil-A. It was a really odd request as he’s only been to Chick-fil-A about as many times as he’s been to McDonald’s which is not many. I wasn’t even sure if he knew what Chick-fil-A was serving.

Since he told me about his lunch plan in the morning I had plenty of time to look up their nutrition information and calorie counts on the Chick-fil-A website. Since their menu is rather simple it was very easy to make my choices. I knew that i would not eat anything that was fried so that left me with their grilled chicken options which were two sandwiches, one with cheese and bacon and one without and two salads, one with fruits and one without.

I carefully weighed the calorie count and decided that I would have a salad for good filler and good volume and I would also eat a chicken sandwich for taste and some more carbs. The two salad options were Chargrilled & Fruit Salad or the Chargrilled Chicken Garden Salad. If you look on the nutrition page the fruit salad is 230 calories and boasts 17 grams of sugar while the plain chicken salad is a mere 180 calories and only 6 grams of sugar. So you would naturally say that the fruit salad is the worse choice and you would opt for the regular salad. But those extra 9 grams of sugar all come from healthy fruits such as strawberries, apple, grapes and mandarin oranges. So it’s a bunch of healthy stuff. And the story doesn’t end here.

What Chick-fil-A doesn’t make apparent at this point is that this calorie count does not include the dressing, croutons, sunflower seeds, granola or whatever else you might end up putting on the salad. The fruit salad comes with Harvest Nut Granola (60 calories per serving, 2 grams of fiber) while the garden salad comes with Butter Garlic Croutons (60 calories, no fiber) and Honey Roasted Sunflower Seeds (90 calories). So once you put all the add-ons onto the salads the fruit salad is sitting at 270 calories while the garden salad is up to 330 calories. So at this point the Fruit salad certainly looks like a better choice in terms of calories. but the story doesn’t end here.

We still have to add salad dressing to the equation. If you go with Ranch or Caesar dressing you just added another 160 calories to either of these two salads. If you opt for the Light Italian dressing you’re only adding 15 calories to your salad. The fruit salad comes with the Reduced Fat Berry Balsamic Vinaigrette which clocks in at 70 calories per serving, but you can certainly opt for something else. So if you get the Fruit salad as listed, with the balsamic viegarette,  it would be a total of 340 calories for the salad. If you ordered the garden salad with ranch it would be 490 calories while if you opt for the light Italian you’d be at 345 calories. At this point I have decided to go with the fruit salad and the balsamic vinaigrette for a total of 340 calories. But the story doesn’t end here.

For the sandwich I chose the Chargrilled Chicken Club, with bacon and cheese for 410 calories. But it’s only 410 calories if you skip the Honey Roasted BBQ Sauce packet that comes with it whether you want it or not. That small packet of BBQ sauce adds 60 calories to the sandwich if you choose to squeeze it on there. I decided ahead of time that I would not use the packet and only eat the sandwich. So I was ready to go in and eat 750 calories for my lunch which is not a terrible amount of calories if you’re eating 2,300 calories a day. It’s actually quite a healthy amount of calorie with decent macronutrient breakdown. But the story doesn’t end here.

Once I ordered my salad and sandwich, to my surprise, they not only gave me the salad, the sandwich, the BBQ packet, the salad dressing and the granola packet but they also threw in the sunflower seeds, which were clearly not listed as an ingredient on their website. They have clearly just “supersized” my lunch by adding another 90 calories to it with a mere 0.5 oz of sunflower seeds that most people would not even notice whether they ate it or not. But that wasn’t even the biggest surprise. The biggest surprise was the salad dressing. The size of the packet was something that could serve a family of four and the label clearly mentioned it. Serving size: 2 tbsp (37g), Servings Per Container: about 2.0. So Chick-fil-A just gave me an extra 70 calories worth of salad dressing which would be invisible to the casual observer. Had I opted for the 160 calories per serving (a serving of Ranch is only 30 grams vs. the 37 grams of the vinaigrette) Ranch Dressing I’d be in the hole for another 160 calories. So that 180 calorie garden salad can end up being a 650 calorie meal once you factor in the croutons, sunflower seeds and the two servings of Ranch dressing that you’ll receive whether you want it or not.

Don’t misunderstand me, I really like the fact that every addition is clearly labeled with calorie content and that Chick-fil-A lists all this on their website and the separate packets give you the option to have a 180 calorie salad or a 650 calorie salad but it’s a minefield and a danger zone for the casual observer. I’d also mention that they list no sandwich on their menu that would beat the 650 calorie salad monstrosity in calories, not even their most calorie dense Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich can top that with its measly 580 calories. And let’s not forget that while the Spicy Chicken Deluxe Sandwich contains an impressive 27 grams of fat, 8 of which are saturated and 9 grams of sugar that dream garden salad with double ranch (who could stop at half a packet I mean one packet is one serving, right?) dwarfs those numbers with a whopping 49 grams of fat, 9.5 of which are saturated, and 10 grams of sugar. And if you’d think that at least you’re getting some fiber if you go with the salad, think again as it’s only 1 gram more fiber vs. the Spicy Deluxe Sandwich with 5 grams vs. 4 grams.

I have enjoyed my lunch at Chick-fil-A today despite all the horrors that I have witnessed, but it just shows that if you’re serious about controlling your weight you have to be on the absolute lookout for yourself as everywhere you go things will try to sabotage your every move towards healthier eating.

Just for the record, I actually ended up eating the Fruit Salad with only 14 grams (less than half a serving) of the Berry Balsamic Vinaigrette dressing, I didn’t eat the granola nor the sunflower seeds and I had the Chargrilled Chicken Club Sandwich sans BBQ sauce for a total of 664 calories. As for my son? He was very happy with his two strips of fried chicken, waffle potato fries and Milk for a total of 650 calories. It’s kind of shocking to see that he ate as much as I did and this is the very reason why he’s only been there 3-4 times in his lifetime which is not much fewer than the times I happened to end up there.

If I were an alcoholic I’d tell you I had been sober for 194 days and you’d pat me on the back. Since I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t even like alcohol, I won’t say that. But since I had been a food addict and a terrible eater I can tell you that I had been eating clean foods and below my caloric expenditure level for 194 days. That is until today.

Today I had my first official cheat day. A day when I just said “screw it” and I ate whatever I felt like eating. I haven’t been completely depriving myself for the past 6+ months but I have certainly not been eating everything that I had ever craved. I’ve been very cautious about my food intake and I have results to show for it. So after 194 days I think I deserve a bit of a slack for my falter and going weak and having a cheat day. So what happened? Why the cheat day on an uneventful Friday in early May?

The day started out as usual. I had my morning breakfast which included my usual 3/4 cup of organic yogurt and a serving of Wheaties Fuel. I mix rolled oats, granola or Wheaties into the yogurt so my breakfast was nothing out of the ordinary. I followed up with 2.5 oz (70 grams) of raspberries and headed out to work. 372 calories, 10 grams of protein. So far so good.

At work I had a mid morning snack which was an energy bar. Again, this is what I usually do, nothing special. 170 calories, 9 grams of protein.

For lunch I have grabbed Chipotle. Chipotle is one of my frequent lunch places. They provide great food and very reasonable calories with awesome macronutrient content as long as you forego the cheese, sour cream, guacamole and the burrito and opt for a plain bowl with cilantro rice, black beans, fajita veggies, barbacoa, tomato and corn salsa. A really great lunch for 540 calories with a whopping 38 grams of protein. 38 grams of protein is not that much but it’s a lot when you compare it to other fast food alternatives and the amount of calories it comes out of. Again, I was doing pretty good so far.

My afternoon snacking went a bit out of hand. I was craving fruits as well as something salty. I went to the grocery store right after lunch and bought bananas. But once I was already there I bought some beef jerky, beef sticks, wheat thins and Triscuits as well as some other stuff. And since I had all this stuff in my office at work I could not resist and ate a large banana, a beef stick and one serving of wheat thins throughout the afternoon. 416 calories and 12 grams of protein.

If you had kept count I was up to 1498 calories for the day with 69 grams of protein so far. Not a bad position to be in. I still had 800 calories left over for dinner and I only needed about 50 grams of protein to go with it to meet my goal of 120 grams of protein for the day. Easily doable, I’ve done it many many times before. So what happened after I got off from work? Well, my wife had a corporate event…

My wife’s company throws some pretty nice parties for their employees and this time they invited their employees and their spouses to a nice suite at the Lone Star Park at Grand Prairie, a horse track. Me and my wife hardly get away from the kids so it was a special occasion for us that does not come around often. So we hired a sitter and we went to the race track. Once we got there and walked in the suite there were sandwiches, chips with dips and salsa, cheese platter with grapes and shrimp cocktails everywhere. They also had a full open bar which I did not utilize other than asking for club sodas at a steady pace. I chose not to eat any of these snack foods and waited as long as I could before I got in line at the buffet.

They had a really nice create your own pasta stir-fry station going where I asked the attendant to pour all the oil she just put in the skillet out and make mine with very little oil, if any, and go easy on the pasta and heavy on the veggies. I asked her to put every possible vegetable in there which consisted of broccoli, mushrooms, sun-dried tomatoes, bell peppers, artichoke hearts, onions and garlic. I also opted for the marinara sauce instead of the Alfredo which is the one I would have opted for 6 months ago. After I ate my fantastic stir-fry I went back for more. This time I got a large plate and piled half of it with steamed squash and zucchini while loaded the other half with two slices of roasted turkey breast and two slices of prime rib. Again, I think I did pretty good and avoided the chicken covered in buttery and creamy sauces, the potatoes Au Gratin and the dinner rolls. This little dinner outing comes in at a respectable 926 calories with 69 grams of protein based on my calculations. The only bad part was the 47 grams of fats almost half of which was saturated. So if you add up all my calories so far for the day I’d be at 2,425 calories and 139 grams of protein which is actually a pretty good day. And this is where I should have stopped and called it quits. But I didn’t.

Instead I went back for dessert and ended up eating a slice of chocolate pie and a slice of Italian Cream cake. Yup, you’ve read it right. I actually had two pieces of cake for dessert. It was insane! I don’t know what had gotten into me but I just had to have it. And if this wasn’t enough I kept munching on potato chips and pieces of cheese throughout the rest of the evening while I kept betting on the wrong horses. All in all I estimate I had eaten close to 900 calories of dessert and junk throughout the evening and 60% of the calories came from the 56 grams of fat that I managed to stuff my face with. So my overall total calories for the day were estimated around 3,300 calories. Not exactly my maintenance intake of 2,300 calories. My overall game winnings were a net loss of $9 which is not too bad when you consider the entertainment value I had received for it.

If I could have a do-over I’d probably stop after dinner and maybe have a single piece of cake as an indulgence but I would certainly not gorge on the dessert and snacks like I did. I feel a bit bad about it but I do know that I haven’t had pie or cake for 6 months and I haven’t eaten this much food in one day for a really really long time and I certainly won’t repeat today’s actions any time soon. But on the other hand this experiment just showed me how easy it is to eat a ton of calories without even noticing it. I ate perfect, or close to it, throughout the entire day and I only blew it after dinner yet I still managed to eat 1,000 calories over my maintenance level. And believe me, I wasn’t even the biggest eater at this event. The only difference was that while 7 months ago I would not have thought for a second about all the food choices I made and I probably would have eaten potatoes and dinner rolls with butter bathed chicken instead of the steamed vegetables and roasted meat. This time every single choice was a conscious one even if it was a bad one. I knew full well what I was doing and what it would cost me in terms of calories even before I took the piece of cake and placed it on my plate. I was fully aware of the damage each potato chip was making in my diet and goal.

While I’m not entirely proud of or happy with the choices I had made tonight I’m still feeling pretty good. I also know that I’ll be running a 10 mile long run on Sunday which will burn more calories in an hour and a half than what I ate in excess the entire evening. So I’m still kind of glad that I had my first official cheat day, at least I know what it feels like. It’s not all that what it’s cracked up to be but I’m sure I’ll have a couple more of these in the coming years.

It’s no secret that I have been tracking my calories since day one of my transformation very diligently and based on the results I’d say with great accuracy and success. When I started I was going to do a simple diet that was going to contain the same food every day. This would have meant no worries about counting calories, you set up the menu once then you keep eating the same thing over and over again until the cows come home. It is a great method to stay on track but it’s also a great method to fall off the wagon due to utter boredom with food. Just because I’m eating at a caloric deficit it doesn’t mean I didn’t want to eat a variety of foods and enjoy the occasional indulgences. And eating the sam thing day in day out is not something that can be sustained for a lifetime. So I had to use a different approach.

I knew if I wanted to eat a wide variety of food items I could not rely on memory and estimation alone to ensure that I’d say within my daily calorie allocation. I had to track it. Luckily there is an abundance of information and websites available on-line that help you with tracking your caloric use. There are even iPhone apps that will do it for you. Since I don’t have an iPhone that was not an option for me. The website choices are abundant, there are plenty of free ones and there are plenty of pay ones.

I have stumbled upon myfooddiary.com somehow and I found the site very intuitive and easy to use. It was relatively easy to use and had a great user interface. It also allowed me to add customized food items and recipes to my profile which was great as I could add all my wife’s home made recipes to it and still enjoy home cooked meals every once in a while once I figured out how many calories they contained. Myfooddiary.com is a pay site that charges $9/month for their service to keep track of your food items. They also have great charting features, progress reports and handy little smiley faces and frowns for things you ate during the day.

For example, if you start your day with a high fiber breakfast it rewards you with a smiley face for the day. But if you eat too much saturated fat you get a frown. It’s a great motivator but I’m not sure I agree with all the smileys and frowns. For example, if you eat a nice shrimp and veggie stir-fry with half a pound of shrimp you will end up getting a big fat frown for the day for going over the cholesterol limit. I think it’s stupid, there is no study that links food cholesterol to blood cholesterol, really. So go ahead, eat all those eggs, you’ll be fine. You also get a frown if you eat, what the software considers, too much protein. I have hit that wall on numerous occasions with some nice red frown faces. But the software simply follows the USDA recommended servings and ratios so I can’t really fault it for these minor things. All in all I was very happy with the way it tracked my calories.

But there was one thing with it that it simply did not do. There was no way for me to look up dates when I ate something last. This was frustrating because sometimes I was curious about when the last time was I had a cookie or when I had red meat last time. I couldn’t do it. I have asked their customer support about this feature and they told me it would not happen in the foreseeable future as their improvements are all planned out in advance and it’s not on the near future plan.

There is one other issue with these on-line tracking systems. If you quit paying your dues all your data goes bye-bye. So it seemed like I was on the hook forever, unless I was ready to give up my precious nutrition data that I oh so diligently logged into the system. They provided no means to back it up or export it.

So I started to look for alternatives, I was thinking about having some kind of web app running on my own server to log my food diary, it could not be all that hard to write something like this, but I hate to reinvent the wheel so I figured someone must have done it already. And I was right. There were open source web applications that already did calorie tracking on your own server with your own database. But they didn’t even come close to the detail and sophistication of myfooddiary.com. Then I finally found an open source app that actually does everything that myfooddiary does and then some!

Say hello to CRON-o-Meter. CRON-o-Meter is an open source multi-platform application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It comes pre-loaded with the entire USDA food database and you can add your own custom foods as you need them. It also does a heck of a lot better job with setting up portions for your food items. One of my major gripes with myfooddiary.com was that you could only set up one unit of measure for every food item and most foods should have more than one unit of measure. Sometimes I measure my veggies by the cup, sometimes I weigh it on the scale. Sometimes I want a tablespoon of flour, sometimes I want to use two cups of the stuff. With myfooddiary.com this was not possible. But CRON-o-Meter handles units just the way the USDA defines it which is awesome. So I have decided to give CRON-o-Meter a test run.

I’m happy to report that I have been using CRON-o-Meter for my nutritional tracking for a month now, and it works great! I can log all my food items the way I want to, I have built custom recipes with it and I can enter all my custom foods with different units of measurement. And best of all, it’s free! So what’s the catch then?

Well, the biggest issue was, how was I going to save my data from myfooddyary.com? Luckily they provide a daily detail page that lists all the food items for that day with nutrient breakdown in a tabulated format. I had to manually copy/paste every day into a spreadsheet but now I have extracted all my data for myself, stored on my home PC. I had to write some Excel macros to be able to convert and format the data but even with the over 1,500 items of food that I had consumed over my 4 month myfooddiary.com tenure it was a relatively painless task.

The only drawback to CRON-o-Meter is that it lacks the nice charts and statistical summaries that were present in myfooddiary. But since I’m only really interested in daily total calories and macronutrient distribution, I just copy those over into an Excel spreadsheet and I can produce the pretty charts myself. I have actually been doing that since the end of January so it wasn’t that big of a deal to keep doing it. Now, CRON-o-Meter still doesn’t provide a search feature in historical data, ie. the last time I had candy but I now keep a food diary in Excel that is just a copy of the daily food items from CRON-o-meter. And Excel allows a quick search of this data which is great. And this way all my data is mine, on my PC and I can data mine it all day long any way I want to.

This all might sound like a ton of work but it really isn’t. Once you get the system down, logging your calories really becomes second nature and takes hardly any time at all. And while I used to do every single meal as I consumed it, now I just enter them all in bulk as I’m getting pretty good at keeping a mental count of my daily calories. When you do it as long as I have been doing, you just look at a slice of whole wheat bread and you know that you’re looking at 100 calories worth of complex carbs with a couple grams of protein and fat.

Bottom line is, myfooddiary.com out, CRON-o-meter in! My monthly subscription on myfooddiary is expiring in 3 days and I’m certainly canceling it. It helped me tremendously but had I known about CRON-o-Meter from day one I would have just used it instead.

I don’t have a specific topic in mind for today’s post so I thought I’d just write down a bunch of the tings that have been happening and I feel might be relevant.

Yesterday was a long run day for me and I ran 8.1 miles (13 km) in an hour and 9 minutes. This was the longest run I have done to date and it was a pretty good one. I have enjoyed it greatly. I find that running gives me time to be with my thoughts alone and think about various things I wouldn’t have time to think about. I think about my family, my kids, office stuff, what I will write on this blog once I get back, stupid stuff or whatever else comes to my mind.

Long runs are meant to be easy and ran at a conversational pace. Even though I have tried it to be easy it turned out to be pretty tough due to the weather. I had to run in 45 degrees (7 C) which is actually a pretty good temperature to run in, not too hot and not too cold. What made the weather tough was the wind. We had 30+ mph (50 km/h) sustained winds with gusts up to 40+ mph (65 km/h). Running in this kind of wind can be anything but fun. Luckily the wind was blowing in my face for the most part heading out and it was behind me pushing me home on the way back. Had it been the other way around it would have sucked even more. It was like getting a second wind (no pun) for the return 4 miles. My pace certainly reflected the shift in direction; I have averaged 8:51 min/mile (5:30 min/km) on the way out and averaged 8:24 min/mile (5:13 min/km) on the way back for a total average of 8:37 min/mile (5:21 min/km) which is right smack the same as my usual easy running pace. So the wind didn’t affect my overall pace as much as I would have thought it would and it helped me produce a really nice reverse split. Reverse split is when you run the second half of a run faster than the first half.

What made the run also tough was the elevation. This particular route has 414 ft of elevation climb in it. Most of it, 250 ft, comes in the front half and the rest in the return. This, combined with the wind caused my pace to be all over the map instead of being a steady slow run. But I have concentrated on heart rate, ie. effort, instead of pace and my heart rate was pretty level throughout the run. I think I handled the run rather well and it was pretty good for my first 8 miler. I’ll be running a lot more than this later so it better feel good. I also managed to break the calorie consumption barrier with this one, I have burned 1,000 calories in the 70 minutes I was out running. That is a whole lot of fat off my tush!

So Sunday was a pretty good run and today called for an easy 3 mile (5K) recovery run. I did it in the evening as morning temperatures were freezing but by tonight the weather was really nice in the upper 60s (20 C). Today’s diet was very clean and low cal, I had brown rice, steamed veggies and canned salmon for lunch and grilled chicken for dinner. It has left me with about 400 more calories to eat after my long run. I have a good friend who I used to fight fires with while I was on the fire department. We would meet up at Whataburger and get some shakes and chat. Lately he has been very busy with work and a newborn son so we hadn’t been seeing much of each other lately. I figured with the extra 400 calories to burn I could afford to get a shake tonight. A 16 oz Kid’s Vanilla Shake is 440 calories, mostly sugar and no real nutritional value. I thought I could afford it once in a blue moon so I called him up before my run but he didn’t answer. I left him a message and went for my 3 miles.

Once I got home there was still no message from him so I thought the evening was a bust and I ate a granola bar, 190 calories and I was just about contemplating eating some bananas to bring my daily calories up to their required 1,800. That is when I got the text message from him that we’re good to go and he’d see me at Whataburger in 10. Darn! I so wished I hadn’t had that granola bar at this point! But I already ate it! What should I do?

I went to Whataburger and ordered the Kid’s shake but I also asked for an extra 16 oz cup and split the shake in half. I drank half of it and my buddy drank the other half. This made me stay within my calorie budget yet still enjoy his company and talk for 45 minutes before he had to head back home to tend to his family. I am really glad I got to see him and we got to chat just like in the good old days over some vanilla shake. The only difference was that I had half of a kid’s cup instead of a regular or large. And quite honestly I can’t tell the difference, all I remember is having great conversation and shake tonight.

As you could see on my last weekly update my weekend calories were much higher than the weekday calories. On Sunday I have reached an all time high of 2,233 calories, a number I have not seen since November 11th, 2009. In November it was Olive Garden, an Italian restaurant, for dinner and leftover from Pei Wei, a Chinese/Thai joint, for lunch that did me in. This time it was crêpes that caused the trouble.

Saturday’s overeating was mild, and the main culprit was the impulse banana I had at the finish of my 10K race. I just couldn’t say no to this delicious sugar and potassium filled snack after running for 10 kilometers (6.2 miles). Considering that I had just burned 887 calories with the running the banana was justified. I had a mild lunch with eggs, whole wheat toast and some mixed vegetables that clocked in at 585 calories so I thought I was in the clear and I managed to offset the banana. And had we not gone out to Carino’s Italian Grill for dinner I would have been just fine. But dinner ended up being 846 calories in itself which is a light fare when you consider that I just went to an Italian restaurant where my favorite dish, Chicken Milano, clocks in at a respectable 1,418 calories, 824 of which comes from fat. Considering my entire meal consisted as much calories as there is fat calories in my once loved meal I think I did awesome. Oh, and I didn’t count the 2 loaves of bread that I used to devour before salad or soup would even hit the table. This time I had no bread.

Sunday’s eating was a completely different story. I didn’t have a banana at a race, we didn’t go to Carino’s for dinner. But we did go to the zoo with the kids and when we go to the zoo it also means we’ll have lunch at Panera Bread. Panera Bread is conveniently located right across from the zoo so we stop in every time on our way home. My wife loves sandwich café places like Panera Bread, Corner Bakery or La Madeline. I went for my usual order which ends up at 540 calories usually. Unfortunately this time I couldn’t stop myself and ate the baguette piece that came with my meal as well and added another 180 calories to my meal. So now instead of my usual 540 I ended up at 720 calories for lunch.

After the 180 excess calorie lunch I still felt I was under control and had I stuck with the plan of eating light for dinner with some lean meat or fish and some steamed veggies I would have been perfectly fine. But this is where the crêpes come in the picture. My family loves crêpes. But we’re not the “let’s go to the mall and stuf our faces full of crêpes” kind of people. We’re more the “Daddy, I’d like crêpes, can you make some please?” kind of people. So my son was pretty persistent with the crêpe request and who can blame him? It’s not like I make crêpes every weekend or even every month. It’s more like a twice a year deal where I succumb to making crêpes.

Making crêpes is not really that big of a deal. But for some reason it always seems too time consuming and we abandon the idea before we’d even make the batter. But once you get down to it it’s really not much worse than making any other meal. The toughest part is the part where you have to flip the crêpe from one side to the other and this is where you can really screw it up and you can end up with a lump of flour paste instead of a nice flat crêpe. My wife, as great and awesome of a cook she is, simply will not make crêpes because of this very fear of screwing up the flip and producing rejects. So crêpe making in my family is a man’s job.

In my home country we actually have a signature dish that is made with crêpes and it’s not a dessert. It’s actually a meat filled crêpe. My son obviously prefers the Nutella filled variety over the meat filled one but I actually love crêpes both sweet and savory. Since they take the same crêpe I made a large batch of crêpes while my wife made the meat filling, 85/15 turkey instead of veal, and we also made a sweet filling from farmer’s cheese mixed with granulated sugar and lemon zest for sweet crêpes.

I would usually eat 4 or 5 of the meat filled crêpes and I’d probably have another 2 of the sweet ones as dessert but this time I had two of the meat filled ones (610 calories) and one of the cheese filled dessert ones (264 calories). I also ate a good amount of steamed veggies to go with it and fill me up. So the crêpes did me in when you combined it with some heavy lunch from Panera Bread. I just couldn’t resist the thin crust over the minced meat and the creamy sweet filling for dessert.

But to prove that all this can be done in a moderated fashion I had leftovers of the crêpes today. Two meat filled ones with steamed broccoli and cauliflower as sides for lunch and one with the cheese filling for dessert after my shrimp with rice and veggies dinner. And today I only had 1,803 calories even though I had the same three crêpes as yesterday. The difference was the low cal dinner of shrimp with moderate portion of rice and the lighter breakfast of yogurt and nuts instead of the eggs and toast. So I think I got the crêpe craving out of my system for at least another 4 months. As for my son, he had one of the meat filled ones yesterday for dinner and one of the cheese filled ones today and yesterday for dessert. I’m just glad he liked the meat filled one too.