Greg's Running Blog

I’ve been working on my transformation for 30 weeks now and I think I can conclude that I just had another successful week.

Eating is really on auto pilot at this point. I don’t think a whole lot about what to eat, how to it, how much to eat. It really comes pretty darn naturally now. This weekend We went to the Chinese buffet and I just naturally gravitate towards the green bean stir-fry, the broccoli beef and the steamed rice while before I’d fill up on sweet and sour chicken with fried rice, a couple of cheese won-tons and egg rolls. Granted I ate 1,100 calories worth of food in one sitting at buffet but I was stuffed afterward. I could not have eaten another bite even if I wanted to.

Now you might think that 1,100 calories in one sitting is excessive. And I would agree with you. I certainly don’t do it every day. But Sunday I ran 11 miles in the morning and burned 1,200 calories. Then I went and rode the same 11 miles and then some with my family on a bike burning another 600 calories. So Even with the 1,100 calorie dinner and close to 3,100 calorie daily intake I was still in a severe caloric deficit for the day. This is the beauty of diet and exercise working in harmony. When you put in the amount of exercise I put in you can get away with eating like a crazy pig every once in a while. But what’s still beautiful about those 3,100 calories today is that they were extremely well balanced: 20% protein (152 grams), 58% carbohydrate and only 23% fat. On a regular day I actually find it quite difficult to eat 2,300 calories, I have to resort to making two servings of oatmeal at 9:00PM just to get in my daily calories. Once I stop my weight loss I’ll have an even harder time to stuff my face with 2,700+ calories a day on average.

In terms of numbers, I have averaged 2,438 calories a day which is mainly due to the well justified 3,100 calorie Sunday. I have averaged 128 grams of protein a day which is a bit more than I need but nothing extreme, I’m gladly taking those numbers.

Strength training is still a struggle. I did put in one exercise on Wednesday but I had to skip Friday again as I had to take my son to soccer right after work which left me no time to go to the gym. I just really need to quit eating out so much and trying to knock out the gym at lunch time. I sound like a broken record with this statement though. Maybe I should actually do it instead of just talking about it.

Running was phenomenal this week! I broke another record, I ran over 40 miles (65 km) in a week for the first time! I actually had to adjust the scale on the chart to fit all this mileage. I also ran my longest run ever with 11 miles this weekend which felt fantastic. And to top it all off I ran a personal best in a 5K race on Saturday morning with a 19:05 time. More on that later. All in all I have burned a whopping 5,149 calories doing running and that one 12 mile outing with the bike on Sunday. That’s a lot of calories!

So based on the calories in vs. calories out where do I stand in terms of weight? The rolling average indicates that I have lost another 1.4 lbs (0.6 kg) this week which is right where I want to be. 1.4 lbs of fat equals 4,900 calories which means that my BMR is 2,402 calories. It means that I have been eating pretty darn close to that maintenance, within 35 calories of it and I have generated all of my weight loss with the exercise that I had put in. It means if I were to quit running today and I would stick with a 2,400 calorie diet I would be able to maintain my current physique. But we all know that I’m not quitting the running and I’m not stopping with the weight loss either until I see some abs.