I am not the most health conscious person in the world ... I work out a few days a week but I don’t really pay that much attention to what I eat and unfortunately at the age of 44 it is starting to show. My guess is, that like many other guys, we have never really learned how many calories are in various types of food or how many calories that we are supposed to be eating. We just eat and when we gain weight we eat less or workout more. When I was in NYC the other day I was at Starbucks and getting a tea and lemon pound cake. In NYC they require that all restaurants show the calories and fat content of all foods. Well, I look at the pound cake and saw 500 calories (207 from fat) and it got me wondering ... what the heck am I putting in my body. Here is my journey through the dietary and health world.
First I realized that I need to track what I was eating because I really had no clue what was going in my body so I started searching for iPhone apps for dieting and counting calories and found a free one called Lose It! The App is simple enough, you give your weight, age and how much weight you want to lose over what period of time. You then enter your foods you eat and exercise you complete and Lose It tracks it all. Now I am on day three of this little experiment and I am driving my wife crazy by calling her at each meal and saying, "can you believe how many calories are in ...". She has been patient with my learning curve but I am sure I am on her last good nerve.
So here are some of my initial findings as I am only a few days into this experiment. First, the fact that I am entering everything I eat and Lose It shows me the calories involved, has led me to skip almost every between meal snack. My calorie intake should be about 2350 calories a day and honestly, I can’t see wasting 500 on a lemon pound cake. On the other side of the equation, I have a treadmill at home and I tend to walk for 30 minutes after work to "de-stress" myself. Well, it turns out that burns 126 calories for me and I am not walking for 2 hours to have a damn piece of pound cake.
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So I have a tool to track what I am eating but what do I do for those times when I go out. Well there are all sorts of websites that provide calorie counts for various food and here is one that I have already used, Chipoltefan.com. 680 Calories for my lunch burrito … not bad. Also, CalorieCount.com has been helpful when Lose It didnt have all the information that I needed.
I started this little dietary educational experience in order to better understand what I am putting in my body and in just a few days it has been eye opening. While I am sure I could stand to lose a few pounds my main goal was to understand what eating Lemon Pound Cake was doing to my diet.
More to come …
Tags:
health,
nutrition