Filler Up, My Tank is Empty

Tomorrow starts month number two at the Y and this is the “make it or break it” for me. Was this just a flash in the pan or a lifetime commitment to being healthy? Last night on the way home from Brian's I stopped and picked up some extra workout clothes. Either these will sit in the corner mocking me for the rest of my life, or I will wear them out. Only time will tell.

So today, the new dietary recommendations came out. After reading through most of them, I have to say, GROW A PAIR USDA.

Brian and I have been doing a lot of reading on nutritional research and data. But the bottom line is this: The human body was not meant to be this sedentary or eat what we typically eat.

So let’s get down to basics. Food = Energy. It’s the fuel we use to drive our bodies, period. Over the course of the last 100 or so years, Americans have started using fewer and fewer calories during the course of the day. Let's not even go back through the millennia for a list of all the activities we are not doing (we are not hunting, gathering or foraging anymore let alone running for our lives periodically during the day). Just over the course of the last century, we’ve stopped walking to town, plowing the earth, churning butter, grinding flour, chopping wood just to name a few activities no longer on my daily chore list.

And since the invention of television and its evil cousin the computer, we mostly sit. Which is basically like leaving the pilot light on the stove, hardly any fuel usage at all. Additionally we are no longer living in cycles of feast and famine, so while I try to explain to my body it no longer needs to store all that energy in the form of fat in the event of a famine, it's not listening to me.

So many of us are going out and running around the streets or down in our basements or gyms pumping iron on ergonomic torture devices, but it’s just not the same. Our bodies are designed to be constantly in motion working and/or sleeping (not at the same time). And so most of us, those who are overweight and beyond and you know who you are, are taking in far more calories than our bodies need and/or want.

And it's not just how much we eat, but what we eat as well. There is plenty of evidence that the rise in Americans' collective weight coincided with the not only the invention of television and the proliferation of the automobile, but the farm friendly government subsidies that led to CORN being in almost everything you put in your mouth. The fact is the USDA is not going to come out and tell you to stop eating products with high fructose corn syrup in them. But you should run to your cabinets right now and purge everything in your house that has it as an ingredient, and then if you have time, watch King Corn. Now, look, I’m not a big believer in conspiracy theories. I do think Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. But lest you think that a powerful source cannot have information suppressed, drop me a line after you watch the Kennedy miniseries on the History Channel. I have now been high fructose corn syrup free for 3 months (thank you Ryan and Adria), but when Brian found the TruWhip at Whole Foods this weekend (fat free, all natural whipped topping with no high fructose corn syrup) it made my life complete.


Does anyone really have a clue how many calories you either A. need or B. are eating over the course of a day? I didn't. The recommended calorie intake for women my age is 10 - 12 calories per pound of your weight, per day depending on your activity level with 12 calories per pound being the marathon runner and 10 being the slug. I'm some where in between. And when you actually add up the calories of EVERYTHING you are putting in to your mouth, you cannot believe how quickly this calorie quota is filled. My first few days changing my eating habits, I was out of calories by noon. When I mentioned to Brian that it's not fair that he gets over twice the amount of calories in a day that I do, he pointed out that if I too wanted to weigh 240 pounds I was welcome to keep up with him. Touché.

Obviously I can pay someone like Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig, or Nutrisystem to count the calories out for me, balance the calories intake properly, and tell me what to eat when, but why should? I'm a relatively smart person, with 2 computers, an iPad, and a smart phone at my disposal. Surely I can do this on my own. And I need to do it not just until I drop a few pounds but I need to maintain it forever. The reality is this is my calorie limit for life period. And well, it’s just depressing that's all. Because it just doesn't go very far.

Some people have sexual fantasies. I have food fantasies. I fantasized about a great breakfast I was going to make Brian to show him that we can have our fabulous diner breakfast for far fewer calories. The menu called for a western omelet, home fries, bacon and sausage, fresh fruit and toast. I set out to do the necessary modifications to fit into Brian’s 500 calories per meal food plan.

Ok, so the 3-egg omelet went down to two eggs. I used low fat cheddar. I didn’t use any fat to cook with just all natural, Trader Joes, zero calories, olive oil spray. I carefully picked out and weighed a tiny red-potato, which I chopped up and sautéed with a couple of tablespoons of onion and green pepper. I carefully checked the calories on the Morningstar farms breakfast patties and started to add up the calories all together to figure out how much fruit to slice up. And whoa! how many calories in a little tiny 4 oz red potato? Are you kidding me? Well right then and there, I realized that I had not only hit, but had exceed his limit. Bread, even at 45 calories per whole grain slice had to go back in the bag. Fruit remained in the drawer. And all I could think of was: if that very carefully prepared and counted meal was over 500 calories, how many calories must be in that breakfast when we order it from the greasy spoon diner down the street? I was shell shocked for the rest of the day. All day long I kept saying, “Can you imagine how many calories are in that [fill in the blank] meal we had at [fill in the blank] restaurant”

But the sad fact is that right now 1400 calories is my pathetic limit. And that's just to lose 1/2 to one pound per week. Once I get down to the weight I want to maintain, I can soar back up to about 1800 calories per day. I guess I’ll have to wait until then to reintroduce myself to pizza. Until then, I guess I'll just keep having my nightly pizza fantasies.