Just a few short months ago, counting calories sounded like the kind of torture that interrogators might use to in order to force a confession out of me. "Counting calories," right there you just alluded to dieting and mathematics, two things that on their own make most people cringe. Sufficed to say, these days I am counting calories, and while it's not at all stressful or difficult, I have noticed a major drawback.
I cannot say thank you enough to Cora, another Fit to Tell blogger, for recommending LiveStrong.com and their Daily Plate service. The site makes the whole process of counting calories extremely quick, easy and un-intimidating. In minutes you can set up a free account, input a few of your person stats and tell it your fitness goal. The site does all the work, calculating the ideal number of calories you should be consuming each day. Then, to make life even easier, the site has a database of about a trillion different meals from restaurants, cookbooks or just combinations of everyday ingredients. After lunch, I just type in whatever I ate and it adds it to my daily log, calories and all. It even keeps track of calories I burn working out.
All of this to say that, at any given moment I can tell you roughly how many calories I've had today and how many more I'm allowed. Having all that information readily available is awesome...and dangerous.
Take yesterday for example. In the morning I swam a little over a mile at the Summit. The workout lasted about 40 minutes. LiveStrong gives me credit for burning just over 800 calories. My calories allowance for the day goes from about 1,600 to 2,400. All this is great. I put in my meals, a powerbar here a piece of fruit there...and I notice I've have some calories to spare. ENTER THE COOKIE!
During the Temple Parks & Leisure Services Advisory Board meeting yesterday, we were all given little box lunches from McAlister’s. I ripped through my sandwich and stared down that the beautiful golden brown visage of this chocolaty desert.
"That's a no-no," my rational, weight loss oriented mind said.
"Sure, but we have so many calories left for the day," my lazy, fat id countered. "It would be a shame to let them go to waste."
Long story long, my id won the debate. I ate the cookie. Point of fact, I devoured the cookie, savoring each and every morsel of it.
At the end of the day, LiveStrong tells me that I did just fine. Still, I feel guilty. Counting calories should be about rationalizing cheating, should it? What do you guys think?
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