Flying Solo
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.
I think that makes sense as the next step to being healthy being a normal thing. It will probably take practice, but we will begin to sense without counting what is the right amount. We may already know and just need to make informed decisions and keep the exercise goals going. You’ve done an amazing job calculating everything. I can tell you must enjoy it or have a natural gift with numbers.
David´s last blog ..Time to HIIT dat?
Good luck.. I’ve seen a lot of people off the counting calorie wagon and just a couple weeks later I jump back on because their eating is out of control.
It’s happened to me several times over the years. I use a simple notepad now that I have in my kitchen so whenever I grab something to eat, it’s easy to write down my calories and go. I know computer apps would probably take extra time rather a simple notepad.
In the long run I would like to be off the notepad.. but I feel I’m still a couple years away.
Again, good luck!
it will be interesting to see how you go. Good luck!
AndrewENZ´s last blog ..Thrive by Brendan Brazier
Hi Greg! I hope you’re doing well with not counting calories. I myself am absolutely fed up of doing it! I had stopped for a week and it didn’t work out too well, but I am trying again this week.
[...] month ago I wrote about how I quit measuring foods and counting calories. It was an experiment and, as David put it, the “next step to being healthy being a normal [...]