I HAD NO CLUE I WAS EATING THAT MUCH!
I realized recently that a missing piece to my cycling performance could very well be my racing weight. I’ve been satisfied racing criteriums at 180 pounds, doing well enough, and chalking up my “natural build” to why I’m less successful in other disciplines (ie. races that involve hills). I train, I race, I ride, and seemingly my weight has not varied. In the mirror, though, I can’t say I’m lean. I still have stuff around the midsection that, in the past, I’ve chalked up to being in my 40’s (barely), and still convinced myself that I am still a really ‘fit’ person.
Finally after adding a couple of pounds after an injury this summer, I realized I needed to get my weight in check. 183 was not acceptable, and I really felt the 3 pounds. A focus on training got me back down to 180, but I know when I’ve cut weight down into the high 170’s I’ve felt the performance gains. But how was I going to finally get serious about it? And what were my limits — could I be healthy, racing at 170 pounds?
I have a goal of 175 for the time being. I needed to come up with a plan to achieve that goal. It was hard to plan specific changes to how I ate, if I didn’t really have any idea of what or how much I ate in the first place. I figured the first thing I needed to do is track what I ate, so I could make adjustments.
I did a little internet research and decided to download a free app called “Lose It!”. It provided a lot of easy ways to log food. It had an extensive database of common foods, chain restaurant dishes, a barcode scanner, and it keeps stuff you eat all the time on an easy to find list that makes searching for what you just ate (or are just about to eat) pretty painless. In “beta” is a new thing called “Snap It!” which allows you to take a picture of what you are about to eat, and have it estimate calories. The jury is still out on that feature.
In addition to logging food, it also tracks calories expended in a couple of different ways. One way is that I could manually log workouts. I would need to do this for my gym workouts, and I’d basically log whether I did primarily weights or circuit training, the amount of time and intensity. You might think, ah, well that’s too much of a pain in the ass to log every workout. But when the calories from the workout adjust what you can consume for the day, not only do you not mind logging them, but you might want to do more so you can eat more! Strava and the iPhone Health app links to “Lose It!”. Those workouts sync automatically. However, if you also have Strava linked to the iPhone Health App, you may get double entries, which you would delete one of the duplicates. The Health App also adds ‘steps’ that can help add calories, but don’t expect much, your 10,000 steps might get you a ritz cracker or so. You can link a lot of different fitness trackers as well.
During setup it asks a lot about your age, activity level, weight, and what your goal is for a given period of time. It then sets a daily calorie intake level to meet that goal in the given time frame. It will warn you if your goal is too aggressive and/or unhealthy.
Up to now, nothing I’ve written is very revolutionary, however, when I decided to start logging calories, it was shocking.
If you’ve never done this, especially with the degree of accuracy offered by this app, I have a feeling you’ll be shocked as well. I’ve been eating a ton of food. It can’t have been healthy. I guess it makes sense that if your are not losing any weight and you are working out 6 days a week, 3 days at the gym, riding 5 days, going out for weekend rides on Saturdays and Sundays that burn 2-3000 calories each, and you already have 2000+ calorie daily allowance just for body metabolism, you must be eating a crapload.
Quite frankly, I didn’t know how much I was really eating until I started logging food. And once you put yourself on a budget, you can’t just mindlessly eat garbage calories. 2000 calories goes really quick. If you ever saw that Rachel Ray show, “$20 a day”, (before she found her niche with dog food) she travels to different locale’s and shows you how you can survive on $20, based on cheap eats (and even cheaper tipping). Logging calories against a 2000 calorie diet becomes very similar. You aren’t going spend 4% of your daily calories (80) on (just) two Twizzlers — that provide nothing but sugar and simple carbs — or if you do, you’re not going to eat half a bag of them! Eat a Clifbar and it’s over 10% of your food for the day. After logging a day or two of food, when you find yourself hungry at 3pm and only have 750 calories left to eat, you start to see consequences from eating garbage calories. It’s really similar to having a monetary limit on food spending and running out of money before you even get to eat dinner.
Do you eat a bowl of cereal in the morning? Well, look at that serving size and next time you pour a bowl of cereal, measure the dry cereal, and you’ll see that a serving size of cereal is less than half of what you normally put in a bowl. Most of us are dramatically overeating, but until we know for sure what the numbers are, we have no idea how bad the problem is. Cutting my serving size and increasing frequency with small snacks through the day hasn’t been that bad.
The next great challenge, which I have not solved completely, is protein. If you search the web, you will see many studies that show that if we are trying to become better athletes, and we are training at an elevated level, we should probably have around 1 gram of protein for every pound of body weight (or more!). Now, consider that at 180lb’s, I might need 180 grams of protien. I still have a 2000 calorie diet, so where do I get the protein from without exceeding my calorie limit.
An “About-Time” plant based protein packet mixed with 1 cup of water (which is the lower calorie but shittier-tasting way to make it vs milk/silk/almond etc) is going to provide 24 grams of protein for 122 calories. Not a bad trade-off. But 5 shakes a day gets you only 120 grams of protein and 610 calories, which means you have another 1400 calories to find the other 60 grams of protein. Don’t expect real food to deliver anywhere near the same calorie per gram of protein punch. It’s also very unrealistic to consume 5 protein shakes a day unless you are have obsessive-compulsive qualities and don’t have to share meals with normal people (like spouses/children). Bottom line is that protein in large quantities is hard to come by under a calorie count from normal food, and you are likely going to need to have some sort of supplement to real food and change your eating habits a little. God bless the vegans out there, getting your body weight in protein has got to be real tough on a plant based diet.
I logged my food for 2 weeks. Everything.
I always logged before I ate, and when I saw what the calorie cost was, I could put the twizzlers down! I lost 2 pounds in that time. My wife and I went on a long weekend and I didn’t log food. I felt guilty as hell, eating what I knew was way more than 2000 calories a day. I only hope that a calorie surplus doesnt add pounds at a higher rate than a deficit takes them off. It’s Monday and I am back logging my calories, already feeling better about myself, but am too afraid to step on a scale. By Wednesday I might feel ready to face the music, and can hope I escaped from the weekends excesses without adding weight.
If you log your food for two weeks, you’ll find that food falls into 3 categories.
1: is totally known and quantifiable. For example: you drink a GNC Lean 25 Protein Shake. Lose It! allows you to simply scan the barcode on the shake. It’s already portioned and nutritional value is known. Pretty exact science. You’ll find other foods fall into this as well. If it has a bar code, it seems like Lose It! knows the nutritional info.
2: Known but not completely quantifiable- Lets say you go to Chipotle and get a bowl. Lose It! has all sorts of Chipotle bowls in the database, but it becomes much more challenging to know how accurate it is, because not every server gives you the same size scoop of rice, beans, protein, cheese, salsa, guac, etc. When you eat, is it a 800 calorie bowl? or a 1200 calorie bowl? You can make some good assumptions, but I worry sometimes that I am under-reporting.
3: Unknown and unquantifiable. You make something at home or eat at a non-chain restaurant, and there’s no easy way to know the calories. If you make it yourself, you can add up the sum of the parts and have a good guess, but it’s going to be hard.
After 2 weeks, I had enough of my intake from either of categories 1 or 2 that I could form a basis from experience of how many calories I might be eating. Just like you can pick up one bike and see it weighs less than another, you start to realize what foods are bigger calorie bombs than others, and become more adept. At home, you can also weigh your food, and find a generic version of the food you are eating and Lose It! will likely have a version of that food that you can enter the portion in ounces or grams. In other words, lets say you have a slice of pizza. Not all slices are the same calories. Some entries in Lose It!’s pizza database are based on “slices”, but you can probably find one that also allows the unit to be in “ounces”. Zero out a plate on your kitchen scale and add a slice to the plate. Enter the weight in “Lose It!” and it will give you an idea of the calories. Not totally scientific, but close enough to keep you from eating 5 slices of pizza and not realize that was 1300 calories or more of food.
If you eat a number of your meals on your own, it’s not that hard to stick to a plan, but it does become hard when you are eating with a significant other. Especially if one of you wants to enjoy each others company over a nice meal, while the other has his smartphone out, analyzing the menu for food that will fit the remaining 800 cals he has left for the day!
If you like having a beer or two, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. If you are on a 2000 calorie day, you can’t do it. The only way you can enjoy a beer is to go for a ride or run, and burn some serious calories, so that you have room to drink your beer and get the protein you need for the day. I brought back some Troegenator from our trip and just looked it up (Lose It! had quite a number of beers from Troegs surprisingly & no I didn’t log those 4 oz tasters) It’s 225 calories for 12 ounces. That’s if we are just counting calories. If you start getting into the impact of alcohol on body metabolism, and the time of day you drink that beer, you might be costing your efforts more than just the extra calories.
There are many cyclists who are neurotic enough about their weight and food that this is a completely pointless exercise. There may even be some people who have an eating disorder that food logging might only exacerbate, so be careful and know that this might not be for everyone. However for those of us who haven’t paid any attention to our diet and how much we eat, a couple of weeks of logging will be a revelation. You don’t even need the app, you could write stuff down, but the app is free (and there are other free apps as well). The idea is just to get a handle on what you are putting in your mouth.
Even while I always felt like I tried to eat the right things, I now see that the quantity of food I was eating, even if it was the right kind of foods (which it wasn’t, really), was the major limiting factor in seeing my weight and BMI improve.
