MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2012

BREAKFAST: same, with ham steak. 579 cals.

LUNCH: not same, salad with salsa instead of ranch, pre-cooked steak instead of chicken. Yummy. Ate while everyone else in the breakroom was scarfing down free pizza. I won't say it was easy to turn my nose up to the pizza, but we can reframe it and call it "challenging". 203 cals.

DINNER: cheeseburgers! Made a pair of 1/4-lb burgers, 2 slices of baby swiss (one for a snack while cooking, the other split between both burgers), two 100-cal tortillas, ketchup, mayo, let/tom/onion. I didn't know if 8 oz of meat would be enough, but I wanted to keep it below 16, and didn't want the conundrum of cooking 12 and wondering wtf I was going to make with the leftover 4. Turns out, it WASN'T enough, and now I'm a little grumpy. I'm not hungry enough to eat anything, but I'm not happy, either. 900 cals, but I'm just guessing on how much ketchup I used.

TOTAL: 1682 cals. Oh, and I bought some padding for my bicycle seat.

Your conundrums are tilting.

Good stuff YTF if you can go entirely without snacks I ought to be able to limit mine.

Any more exercise sessions - walking, or whatever - planned for the near future?

It might not necessary solve the problem fwiw. At least I found the harder minimalistic seat to be much more comfortable back when I was going to work with bike, riding close 100 miles/week.

Something that looks (or even initially feels when you sit on it) more comfortable won't necessarily be that for long bike rides.

I was about to suggest this because it's my experience too, however... YTF is probably riding more upright than most people, and weighs more, and these 2 things are going to make his experience different than yours.

ytf,

Of course you're gonna be really hungry for dinner if you eat a 200 calorie lunch.

I'm only vaguely following this thread, so apologies if this is a redundant post, but huge congrats on sticking to your salad rather than eating pizza because (1) it's free or (2) I should socialize with my coworkers or (3) just this once I deserve it whatever other host of excuses you could have come up with. This suggests a real shift in your mentality - well done. Keep this up and prove me right!

1682 calories for the day?? I would have had a free slice of pizza at lunch if I were you. But if one slice is tilting, then maybe 0 is better.

As luck would have it, my responses to each of these posts are identical:

"If I had known at the time that lunch only packed 200 cals, I would have made different decisions throughout the rest of the day." Like having the pizza, or cooking another 1/4-lb cheeseburger (and worrying about the leftover 1/4-lb another day). I don't log the meals as they come, I do 'em all at the end of the day.

If you are cooking at home you should probably just start logging as stuff cooks. That way you can just cook a little extra or less before eating dinner. I don't really understand putting it off until the end of the day, you can't course correct at all.

Best would be throughout the day but maybe you don't have a smartphone.

Ytf,

By now you should be able to come up with a decent guess at calorie counts on your own.

MFP app is really good.

D,

I suspect he hasn't had salsa much and didn't realize how low cal it is compared to ranch until he logged it.

You've eaten a salad at lunch every day basically since you started. How did you not have an idea what that would be like?


You should really plan ahead. When I go out to eat, I don't just order whatever the **** I want and then see how many calories it is, I look it up ahead of time to see what I can eat.

Before I eat dinner I see how much I can eat to stay under my goal. If I know I am having chicken breast, then I see how much I could have and still me good.


200 calories for lunch seems insane to me. Like how little steak is that?

I don't know, it's not a willpower thing with the snacks, I've just never been in the habit of snacking. It's not like I'm making a conscious decision not to snack, nor like I'm resisting any temptation to do so. If you're in that habit, I don't see what's wrong with it, as long as you fit it in under your daily calorie allotment.

(Fattie now giving advice ITT.)

And as for exercise, I was thinking that yeah, it's been a few days. I packed a gym bag, intending to stop in after work Sunday night, but the holiday weekend crowd led to OT, so I put it off for a day. Then last night was weird, EVERYBODY was dragging ass. Not just employees, the players, as well. I don't know if they're tired from long sessions (the BBJ is up to $100k, a very unusual thing for around here), as has been suggested at work--personally, I think they were trying not to run the AC, and the room being warm contributed to everyone's sluggishness--so that's my excuse for not going last night.

I'm off today, and as soon as I finish this breakfast, I'm heading out to the garage to install my new bicycle seat cover (you BET I'm riding upright!), employ my new tire pump, and pedal my ass all over town. After that it's lunch, and then [shudder] sober karaoke.