After months and months and maybe even years of going on and on about how I don’t mind what I eat, I just run more when I want to eat more, I began doing something truly stupid: counting calories. It appeals to that part of me–is it the T? Or the J?–that swoons over certainty and measurement, which just happens to be the same part that drives Spouse nuts, but that’s a whole ‘nother story. And since my friend-boss introduced me to a free app (MyFitnessPal) that keeps track of the calories you consume and the calories you burn, and alerts you to how many calories you have left each day if you want to meet your weight loss/maintenance/gain goal is so very easy to work with, I thought I’d give it a shot. You know, just out of curiosity.
My first mistake was convincing myself I was just doing it out of curiosity. I gained a few pounds when I moved back in Kentucky, probably because my dear mother loves to bake and if there are sweets in the house, I’m probably eating them. It was literally only a few pounds, but those pants I’d bought to fit my post-baby, post-thyroid problem figure were getting pretty tight, and that little bit of pudge above my hips had come back and was starting to jiggle when I ran. That’s just uncomfortable on so many levels. So when I put my data into the app, I reported that I wanted to lose 5 pounds. It gave me a daily allowance of ~1300 calories. Granted, you can “buy” more by exercising more, but people: 1300 calories is a price I’m not willing to pay for anything. This is my conclusion after four days of using the thing.
Unwilling to subject myself to such cruelty, I’m back to reckoning that if I only gained 5 pounds over two months while eating lots of sweets at Mom and Dad’s and running approximately 1/4 of the miles I’m doing now on a weekly basis, I’m probably okay. The pudge has already started to dissipate, anyway, and I suspect as I move up past 10 miles on those weekend long runs, I’ll be back in fine form.
Of course, I did learn as much as the last time I devoted some attention to counting calories: some foods are the devil. Some foods love you and want to be eaten all the time so they can be nicer to you. I can never order a chocolate chunk cookie from Jimmy John’s again, because the damned thing has more calories than the sandwich itself. I can, however, have a heapin’ helpin’ of what Spouse calls “fancy beans ‘n weenies,” or a delicious sloppy mixture of black beans, smoked sausage and tomatoes, with an equally large salad on the side. It’s nice to check in and readjust once in a while…and then get back on the road so you can have two cookies tomorrow.
