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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A proper diet is the most important aspect of the healthy lifestyle trinity; diet, strength training and cardio exercise. And this is the part where a lot of people fall short or sabotage themselves, their goals and progress. I have seen a lot of people going to the gym then eat a juicy burger with fries afterward and wash it down with a large soft drink. I have seen people crossing the finish line at the 5K race and head straight for the cookies and Gatorade at the recovery table instead of the carrots and water. I have seen people stepping off the elliptical machine to gulp down 400 calories worth of “recovery drink”. And I have heard of numerous people doing a P90X training program but ignoring the nutritional booklet that comes with it.

I can safely say that I am trying to stay on top of my diet. I have no cheat meals, no cheat days, no cheat weeks. I just have healthy eating day in day out. But there are times when you get a curve ball thrown at you and you just have to roll with it. Eating out with family and friends can definitely be a huge curve ball.

Every time we have a birthday lunch at work I get very concerned. I’m hoping that the birthday person will pick something healthy and I would feel comfortable picking a food item off the menu but usually people are quite inconsiderate of my food choices when they pick their birthday lunch. It’s their birthday after all. So how can you cope with this kind of problem?

I could simply say “no thank you” and not go. But somehow I feel that is not the right thing to do. I want to be part of the team and partake in the company lunch. So I am obligated to go. I could always just go but not eat. I have a co-worker who does just that. He will go out with the rest of the lunch crowd and have an ice tea with no sugar and just partake in the social aspect of the lunch. But he definitely gets a lot of crap for it every time. I on the other hand love to go out. But I always fear the menu and I feel like restaurants are like a box of chocolate: you just don’t know what you’re gonna get.

I’m getting better and better at navigating the menus at restaurants and I can put together a mental image of what every item probably contains calorie and nutrient wise. I always try to look up the restaurant’s menu and hopefully nutritional guide on-line before we arrive to the place. If nutritional guide is not available I will try to find nutritional information for a similar restaurant and go with their estimates. I mean a fajita is a fajita and probably contains similar amounts of meat regardless which restaurant prepared it.

Like my favorite Mexican restaurant Uncle Julio’s does not provide nutritional information. But On The Border does. So I am pretty sure I need to stay away from the chips and salsa regardless of which one I end up at. I also know that eating 4 flour tortillas is probably not the best thing to eat and maybe two should be a wiser decision.

Then you also have the situation when you check out their menu and nutritional guide at home, go to the place and they don’t serve what you picked out. Panera Bread claims to be healthy eating. They are, as long as you stick with their vegetarian black bean soup, which is very tasty, and half a Frontega Chicken Pannini. But if you go on a Sunday instead of a Saturday they don’t serve vegetarian black bean soup. Instead they have sugar infested tomato soup or saturated fat horror baked potato soup. So what do you do? You suck it up and roll with it. It is not the end of the world and you just make the best decision you can.

Sometimes I go to a restaurant that I used to visit often but have not been back in a long time, especially since my lifestyle change. These places can be a total crap shoot. You can walk in all confident believing that you know the menu and end up sorely disappointed with the once loved food. This actually happened to me at Razzoo’s just a couple of weeks ago. You can also find a pleasant surprise and find a completely different section of the menu with food selections you would have never considered in a million years before.

Sometimes I end up at restaurants that I have never visited before. And they also tend to be hole in the wall time establishments that don’t even have a website let alone nutritional guides. So you go and fly blind. You hope for the best and you make the best of it. The office group recently visited a restaurant called Yucatan Taco Stand. They make decent burrito bowls and fish tacos but they don’t provide nutritional information. I was going to order something extravagant off their menu had I known the nutritional value but since I was clueless I stuck with a burrito bowl instead and used Chipotle’s nutrition guide to estimate the calories. I have also tried to contact the restaurant via e-mail but they chose not to respond to my query.

So as much as I love eating out nowadays it’s a mixed feeling every time the office party decides to go out. I feel like I’m out of my comfort zone and it puts me into a new challenge every time. I love challenges but I feel the rewards are not always worth it. So how do you feel about eating out when on a diet? What do you do? Do you have any advice for me how to tackle situations like this?

Greg,

I appreciate your feedback but I’m going to respectfully take you to task on a few things and defend myself and Razzoo’s a bit. I noticed immediately that you said you “had doubts” and it seems in my humble opinion that you were in somewhat of a pre-determined mindset. You said that you were “stuck” in Razzoo’s being the dining destination. Wow, I’m already at a disadvantage.

We handle multiple requests for lighter options everyday even though we don’t list such options on the menu. Greg, our food is hearty, authentic and appropriately spiced. But, you stated that “you knew for sure there was no way you could eat anything healthy” at my establishment”. ? Really? I don’t read anywhere that you asked your server anything other than what kind of fish we served.

We work very hard to accommodate guests looking for healthier options. I would suggest a few items that are far from difficult and actually very easy for us to prepare. If our servers are asked for ideas of alternative cooking methods they are skilled at offering suggestions. About 10% of our food orders come in without any form of special instruction or request. At Razzoo’s “the answer is always yes, so what’s the question friend?”. It’s printed on the menu. I would propose:

Blackened Chicken? How about grilled chicken, lightly spiced, with white rice. A green dinner salad, no onions, no dressing or dressing on the side.

Blackened Fish? How about not blackened (It’s Tilapia by the way), lightly spiced or not spiced, grilled with white rice instead of dirty rice? Same dry salad as a substitute fro veggie.

We can boil or grill shrimp instead of frying. We have multiple salads on the menu that can be made as simply as a dieting guest prefers. The croutons can actually be left out. We have pastas that can be served with no sauce or sauce on the side. We have fresh green beans in house that we use for fried green bean appetizer. They can be easily sautéed and served as a side veggie with any item. We can do it. Do it everyday in every single restaurant.

As for nutritional information? I’ll never do it as to not mislead my guests. We are a fresh-prep concept. Subtle differences in ingredient amounts from dish to dish lead to substantial variances in fat and calorie content from one dish to another of the very same item. Those numbers can’t be reliable within an acceptable scientific range. There is enough scientific data on this available so as to not belabor that point.

I want you to enjoy your experience at Razzoo’s or at least have enough information to decide that it is not for you. I believe we can not only show you a great time but certainly provide you a meal that can meet your needs….if asked.

I’ll buy you and your family dinner to prove it. I hope you take me up on it. Let me know.

You can post this or forward as you wish. I realize that some are genuinely interested in productive, healthy discussion and debate and that some just want to pick a fight or argument or engage in “gotcha” contact with businesses. I’m ok with that. I am very serious about responsible restaurant and business management and am very proud of what we do.

I look forward to any further input you have and hope to see you in for dinner with us soon!

Respectfully,

Jeff Powell
President

Pretty solid argument with some fair points but I just wasn’t entirely convinced so I shot him another response.

Jeff,

First of all I would like to thank you for such a courteous and prompt response. It’s not often that you get a real response from a real person especially in such a short time.

As I have written in my earlier e-mail I was a frequent visitor of Razzoo’s before I have decided to shed some fat. I wouldn’t call myself a regular but we probably visited your restaurant half a dozen times a year. I was familiar with your menu and I was familiar with the options in food you had. I never bothered to look further than what was on the menu as I have always managed to find something different that I liked. We liked the tasty and zippy food just as much as everyone else who eats at Razzoo’s. When I wrote I “had doubts” it was an educated doubt based on prior experience. I knew your food and I knew it can’t be that good for you. I want you to know that it’s not only Razzoo’s where I have doubts. It’s practically every restaurant that I re-visit since the start of my transformation into more conscious eating. I always go in with concerns whether they offer anything that could be remotely close to healthy. I attribute the fact that I have found your food overly salty this time to my new eating habit that is significantly lower in sodium than before and my palate have re-adjusted to a much lower threshold level.

I have asked our server, Greg, several times in several ways if you provided nutritional information on any of your food items. It should have been a clear sign that I was looking for something on the healthy side. I agree, I did not ask for a special custom meal, it simply did not cross my mind. I will be sure to remember that in my future restaurant outings. I guess our server could have been a bit more pro-active about the situation but come to think of it the blame is probably just as much mine. I really wish you had been our server that night as the options you have offered in your response sure sound better than any of the alternatives that I could pick off the menu. It’s a real shame that I wasn’t offered any of these options by our server.

Nutritional information for made to order food can certainly be misleading. Even on prepackaged food studies have found that the actual caloric value can be off by as much as 18%. I am not denying this fact. But I am also positive that if the menu showed that the Tricky Fish with dirty rice and crawfish etouffee contains 1,800 calories and 5000 mg of sodium we can agree that it doesn’t really matter whether that 1,800 becomes 1,700 or 1,900 depending on how big of a dollop of butter was used when the fish got blackened. I will most certainly not order it.

As I have reached this point into my e-mail writing another response hit my inbox from Jeff:

Greg,

I’ve read your review after responding to you. I respect your opinion but find it inaccurate, pre-determined and without any fair objectivity. Most disturbing I find your comments about the patrons on-site judgmental and disturbing. Your efforts to improve your health are admirable. Congratulations. I question whether that gives you an appropriate platform to make such judgments or at least inferences about those around you based on their appearance.

Best of luck to you.

Jeff

So I had to respond to his last e-mail as well and I have added the following passage as closure:

I just received your second e-mail as I was writing this response. I might be sitting on a high horse now that I have gotten a handle on my own eating and health. I might be more judgmental of other people around me now that I’m no longer obese. But after eating part of my unhealthy meal I could not help but wonder as to “who eats at Razzoo’s?”. And there was not one person in sight that I would have called healthy looking. It might have been a coincidence but it is a fact. I also just became a US Citizen (hence the celebratory trip to Razzoo’s) and I truly value the rights and liberties the constitution gives me, especially about free speech. I will post your response on my blog tonight, I’m a big fan of “let the other side be heard too” mentality. I think by posting your response I will have provided an appropriate and objective position.

On a side note, I’d like to mention that my blog ranks 16th for “Razzoo’s Nutrition” on Google search as of this morning, a mere 10 hours after my blog entry has been posted.

Again, thank you for your time and response, I appreciate it.

Regards,

Greg

I think at this point we’ll just have to agree to disagree. His statement about the fact that only 10% of orders come in without special request makes me wonder though. Does he consider holding the mayo on a burger a special request? Or does it mean that 90% of the customers are unhappy with the menu choices by default and they have to make changes to it just to make it palatable. I’m pretty sure if Hell’s Kitchen with chef Gordon Ramsey would have a 90% special request rate he’d tell every one of his customers to “piss off!”. If I were a restaurateur I’d probably wonder why 9 out of 10 of my customers want to change the food items and alter my food. But then again, I’m not one.

I also find it perplexing that he mentions that they do special healthier portions for customers on a daily basis all day every day at all his restaurants. Wouldn’t that be a clear sign that there is a demand for it and maybe it’s time to stick it on the menu? I mean I’m not a businessman or anything but this kind of stuff seems to be Economics 101. But as long as people vote with their wallet and mouth and Razzoo’s is doing well who am I to stop them? I’m just saying if you made the commitment for a healthier lifestyle and eating habits you might want to pass on Razzoo’s unless you are comfortable with asking for special requests of grilled chicken with steamed rice.

Update 4/23/2011:

This blog entry is still one of the hottest and most often visited one of my blog. I keep getting replies which give me advice about weight loss, how to eat healthy and how I should probably not eat at Razzoo’s. So I decided to post a bit of a status update for those who fail to check out the rest of my blog.

1) This blog post was written over 14 months ago. Since then I’ve lost another 33 lbs (I’m 160 lbs as of this writing), ran 6 marathons, 4 of them with Boston Qualifying Time, including the Boston Marathon this month and I’m quite comfortable with my current physique, fitness and body. Sure, I’d like to lose another 5lbs or so to finally see my abs for the first time ever and I’m chipping away at it but I could afford to eat at Razzo’s any time now if I chose to. I really don’t need any more advice on how to eat and what to eat, I’m probably as fit and healthy as anyone could get or wish for.

2) I’ve been true to my word and neither I nor my family have eaten at Razzoo’s ever since this incident. I have no intentions of eating there ever again, certainly not until they start providing nutritional information.

3) My blog posts are actually still no. 1 and no. 2 for “Razzoo’s Nutrition” not 16th. I just checked.

4) My blog posts is and was not meant to skew stats. It was posted to point out how ignorant Razzoo’s is when it comes to healthier eating but apparently it’s no more ignorant than their customer base so it is a match made in heaven and Razzoo’s is making money by catering to their target market so it’s really no skin off my teeth.

5) Razzoo’s website, while revamped from the last time I checked, still does not provide any kind of nutritional information or nutrition guide. Until they change that my blog will beat their website in search rankings any day of the week.

So she decided that we should go to Razzoo’s. Razzoo’s is a “Cajun cafe”. They serve fish, crawfish, shrimp and the like with some heavy sauces that have some kick to it. I used to go there and think that the food was pretty good. I enjoyed eating lunch there every now and then. I knew that their general menu wasn’t all that healthy but I had hopes to find something a bit more on the low cal side. I wanted to check their website prior going to get an idea about their food and nutritional information but we ran out of time and with two anxious kids and a wife in the car waiting I thought we better hit the road and go. As it turns out I didn’t miss much by not checking the website.

I usually don’t get too pissed off about restaurant menus nowadays as most of the time at least they’re trying their best with one or two healthy(er) items on the menu and the food I end up getting is usually half decent. But I got so pissed off after I read through the menu at Razzoo’s that I had to send them a letter so they knew how I felt. If you want the Cliff Note’s version their food is greasy super salty junk and I have not seen anything even remotely close to it in the past couple of months since I really started watching what I eat. I mean I’d go to McDonald’s over Razzoo’s any day of the week. Over at McDonald’s at least they have the balls to tell you what you’re putting in your mouth. Well I’m sure it isn’t out of the goodness of their hearts that they post the nutritional information but at Razzoo’s the utter and complete ignorance of having any kind of sensible food choice on their menu and the absolute lack of nutritional information is just not worthy of my, or anyone else’s, business. That was the short version. For the longer version feel free to read my letter that I have sent to them this morning.

Hi,

I have visited your Bryant Irving, Fort Worth, TX location the other night for dinner with my wife and two young children. We used to visit Razzoo’s on a regular basis but four months ago I have decided to lose weight and eat right. Losing weight while eating out is not an easy task so we have limited our eating out for the past four months.

Tuesday night called for a celebration and under my wife’s recommendation we went to Razzoo’s. I had doubts about possible food selections even before we got there but once I took a look at the menu all my doubts were gone. I knew for sure that there was no way I could eat anything even remotely healthy at your establishment. Was it not for our two young children I probably would have walked right out and never looked back.

But with two kids in tow it was no possible. We were stuck and we were going to have dinner at your restaurant. My wife opted for the fried catfish basket, a long time favorite of hers with a good kick of spices. My son ordered the children’s fish with fries and my daughter got the fried chicken tenders with fires. I have asked the waiter if he had information about the nutritional information of your menu items. He said that there is not a piece of paper that he could bring out for me to look at. Neither Chili’s nor Corner Bakery has nutritional information available to give the customers but both restaurants have nutritional information posted on their websites and they can look it up and provide you with the information upon request at the restaurant for any item in question. When I asked our waiter he said that was not possible either. Basically they serve food that they have no clue about. He had to go and ask what kind of fish was in your Tricky Fish menu item.

I thought that I would just go home and check on the least of the worsts that I would manage to pick out and see what the damage was by looking up the nutritional information on your website. Unfortunately your website does not provide this information either. In desperation I have opted to order the Tricky Fish with blackened catfish over dirty rice and crawfish etoufee and green beans. I figured the blackened fish can’t be that bad even though your menu mentions it is “butter basted like crazy” which is never a good sign.

What your menu has failed to mention was that it’s not only butter basted it is salt based like crazy too. Your food was so salty it was almost unpalatable. Our poor waiter had to keep shuttling water to us as if it was going out of style. The rest of the items on the plate must have also been basted in butter as the plate was oozing with fat. I have never seen such a small portion of green beans that were swimming in so much white creamy fat before. I have clearly made the wrong decision. I have passed on 2/3rd of the dirty rice and the garlic bread and the waiter had the gall to offer a to go box for the aftermath that was left on my plate. Needless to say I declined.

My son’s dinner consisted three tiny strips of fish with a large amount of fries. He’s only 5, weighing in at a solid 33 lbs and he was left hungry. Maybe because I did not let them order a soft drink and they did not get any of the empty calories from there. Luckily my 20 month old daughter left enough of her chicken strips to fill him up. Again, there were absolutely no healthy options for our children to eat from your menu.

All in all I was sorely disappointed with your food selection and total lack of nutritional information. Having a general idea about your food and its fat and salt content I can see why you chose not to disclose any of the information to your patrons. And to call a salad with “killer croutons and zippy dressing” topped with fried popcorn shrimp rabbit food is just plain wrong.

I run a weblog at www.gregstransformation.com about my weight loss transformation. I will be posting my review of Razzoo’s along with this letter for all my readers to see. Should you chose to reply I will be more than happy to publish your rebuttal as well.

Best Regards

Greg

Bottom line is that if you’re ever in Texas looking for some Cajun food and you care the least bit about your arteries and general health I’d stay away from Razzoo’s. I know that is what I’ll do. I’m also betting that this post will rank super high for Razzoo’s nutritional information and calories in search engines in no time, I know people looking for nutritional information about Uncle Julio’s seem to end up here. When people search for those keywords they should end up on the restaurant’s site not on a personal blog coplaining about the lack of such information. Maybe it’s time that the Razzoo’s folks rethink their lack of nutritional data on their website. Better yet, they should rethink their food choices. But then again what do I know? Looking at the menu and their patrons on site I’m probably no longer their target market.

UPDATE: I have actually received a response from Razzoo’s to my query. Read all about it in my Part 2 of the Razzoo’s Saga