Much hate about food tracking - October 18, 2010

I hate tacking my food.  HATE IT!

It is boring and monotonous.  I have a great program that I work with – Training Peaks – and when I am tracking food I do get  the results that I want, but ugh!  I just hate it.

I actually don’t do it all that often.  Generally about twice a year for two or three months (my record is four and half) to get to my weight goals or when I’m in the process of changing my weight goals or just eating poorly (which is still probably better than 80% of the country just based on my overall health).  Eating poorly for me, means eating lots late in the day to the point of overeating.   I don’t get that “full” feeling easily and if I’m not paying attention can happily eat an entire pizza or its equivalent.

So I fight a bit with portions even though I eat healthy foods and I couple that with cravings for carbs in the evening.  All through the day I can keep a pretty good balance of 50/30/20 (carb/protein/fat) or even 45/40/15 on a great day; in the evening when I should basically be eating fruits, vegetables and meat, I want breads, potatoes and rice.  This is where tracking comes in.  I can see how I have been doing through the day and know exactly what my consumption can be at night before I bump up against my food limits.

I just hate doing it.

Right now I just crossed over the 170 pound threshold (actually I screaming past it to 171) and need to see if I can step my maintenance weight down.  A couple of years ago I was at about 190 pounds and after monitoring and adjusting my foods several times I realized that if I dropped weight for a bit, I would plateau.  Then if I maintained that plateau until it started to climb, basically when my body had recovered, and went back to eating carefully I would drop even lower, until another plateau and…

So I hit my last plateau late this spring and settled around 168 pounds.  Each step down seems to be 6 to 8 pounds from the last plateau.  This time I should be able to reach a weight of 160 to 162 which should be my final big drop, with little ones just to help me not creep up too high again.  So with Christmas and Thanksgiving in the way I should be close to 160 by the New Year, at which point I can stop tracking food for awhile.  I could probably get lower but considering that I am looking at endurance riding having an additional five or six pounds, or 20,000 calories, of energy is probably a lot healthier.

It’s actually a good time to do it, my activity level is consistent, so I don’t need to make huge daily adjustments for calorie burn and with a couple of exceptions there are unlikely a lot of instances where my food plan will get derailed.  It will be nice to maybe lose some of my gut and get back to having even my tightest pants fit comfortably.  But I hate tracking food!  There is something to be said about liposuction.