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 �what is Man? a miserable little pile of secrets.� - andr� malraux "i desire to live in peace and to continue the life i have begun under the motto, to live well you must live unseen." - rene descartes note random entry image credit design by : ilazarn ikmal powered by : diaryland |
thinking out loud about nutrition.
2011-07-15 @ 12:33 p.m.
this entry is about a lot of fitness/nutrition stuff. feel free to ignore. i'm just sitting here, reading a book about the benefits of weight training, and i got to thinking. the weight loss thing has been slow for me. it's definitely happening, and i'm feeling and noticing changes in my body (belly is slowly shrinking, sweet definition in biceps and shoulders!), but the scale isn't moving much. i know this can happen when one is recompositioning one's body, but still, psychologically, it can be disheartening. my other, major problem, is overeating. to be fair to myself, i don't often go over my maintenance calories for the day (i don't eat more than i burn), but i'm often not creating a large enough deficit for myself to actually lose any weight, either. this is good and bad. good in that i can actually build some muscle, but bad because i'm just building muscle under my fat, which can't go anywhere, because i'm not eating in a deficit. i was frustrated until i started thinking about how this happens all the time. my day will happen, i'll eat like 1500 calories of good stuff, and then suddenly it's after dinner time and i eat 700 calories of dessert and/or snacks and my shit's ruined. why do i do this to myself!? it's all boy's fault. i love him to death, but he's the biggest snacker this side of the mississippi. he doesn't eat ALL day, then he comes home, wolfs down 3 servings of dinner (if i cook something that's 4 servings/recipe), and eats 2,000 calories of dessert, easily. for me, it's hard to resist dessert, so i try to shape my daily eating habits around the fact that i will be having it later. but even if i start the day out right, something inevitably happens that ruins it. there are two solutions to this problem. the first one is to stop letting boy decide on our dinner recipes. he probably craves what he is not getting all day (i've read extensively that the snacks and meals we crave tend to correspond to whichever nutrients our bodies are lacking. interesting stuff, really. sometimes we crave salty stuff because we're dehydrated and sodium makes us retain water. ah!). so what is the pattern? pasta with some kind of meat and super creamy sauce. followed by crazy chocolate dessert. huge meaty stews with a ton of potatoes and cheese. HUGE chicken pot pies (yes, i made him completely homemade chicken pot pies. i won't deny they were delicious, but they were also 900 calories a pop). thai/chinese/japanese fare with a mountain of sauce and rice. what do all these things have in common? a boatload of calories, and the majority of them from simple carbs (pasta, white rice, etc). so i'm glad i realized this when i did, as i was sitting here reading and halfheartedly making a weekly shopping list. as much as i love him and his input (one of our favorite things to do is peruse our many food mags together), i'm going to overrule from now on. reasonable dinners, and the occasional (1-2x per week) high carb, high calorie yumfest that i will carefully budget for. it's getting tiring working out 5-6 days a week and not seeing any scale changes. PS: here's a (delicious!!!) example of how he unknowingly sabotaged me. he wanted a quick chocolate dessert, so he found some individual chocolate lava cakes. holy shit were they good. and fast, and easy as hell to make. um, however. each serving is 1000 calories!!!!!!! wtf! so if you're not watching your weight at all, or you have someone you're trying to impress, or you just like chocolate a lot, you should probably try this recipe out. but at least you've been warned. ♥ |