Calories : counting, charting, and controlling

This post is all about calories, how I count them, chart them, and control them to boost my energy, be more aware of what I'm eating, and fluctuate them to trick my metabolism into speeding up (haha metabolism! fooled you!)

Calories. I used to ignore them, utterly. I was fixated on counting the fat content of my food, and I figured that as long as it was "low fat" then it was : a.) healthy, and b.) not going to make me gain weight. Then I started paying attention to sugars... still convinced that cutting out/back on sugar and fat alone was going to make me healthy and slim. Although it was good for me to cut out the "bad" fats and sugars from my diet, I was still missing a very important factor in my weight loss arsenal: The Calorie. As it turns out, those pesky numbers really do make a world of difference in my overall health and weight. Jerky little numbers!

I was not at all thrilled at the idea of having to weigh my food (obsessive much?!) and then keep a chart of what I ate, when I ate it, and how many buggerly calories were in it (yeah, obsessive maximus)... and then do the math that is involved in calculating the calories in 1/8th of a pan of pasta, or 1 tsp of homemade mustard vinaigrette... and then do more math to figure out what the totals for each meal are... and then the total for the day. Math is my nemesis. (>_<)

Counting, charting, controlling...

Yeah, sounds tedious. It is.
Uh huh, sounds like a pain in the fat bottom. It can be.
Scary! Sounds like fractions might be involved. Sometimes they are.

BUT! It's so totally worth it. Seriously, it works. And yeah it's tedious and you have to make nice with the calculator and the scales, but with just a little bit of calorie-crunching time and effort I can already see/feel a drastic difference in my metabolic rate (and it's been really beneficial in helping me to fight the binge, too!)


Ok, so flash back to 6 months ago (this blog is not equipped with a Tardis, so you'll have to time travel on your own) which is when I decided to make more of a daily conscious effort to loose some weight:

I thought I was doing myself a favour by cutting out the pasta, potatoes, and bread at night, opting for rice instead. Little did I know that rice is basically just as caloric as pasta... so that big plate of basmati that I had before bedtime wasn't helping at all.

I thought olive oil was a magical "eat all you want and don't worry about it" food stuff that kept my skin soft and my arteries clean (which it does) and since it came from fruit, surely it was ok to pour it all over everything without a care in the world... dun dun dun ... there's 81 calories in that Tablespoon of olive oil, and yeah, that adds up fast when you pour it like liquid awesome sauce all over everything that graces your plate.

Calories are not totally wicked, though. Sometimes they can be really helpful, particularly when you are lifting weights, doing ab crunches, and scrubbing those shower tiles til they gleam! I discovered that when I ate less than 900 calories in a day, I was tired. Surprise, surprise.

Now, flashback to 27th January 2012 (insert psychedelic effects and cheesy harp music here) which is the day that I decided to start paying attention to the calories and keep a record of what-and-when-and-how-much I ate. (I also decided to exercise every day, but that's a story for another post.)

Here's how you do it:
Weigh what you eat
Write it down (example: pickles --- 12 g)
Read the label or use the internet to find out how many calories are in the pickles/whathaveyou
Write it down
Do this for everything you eat
Add up the calories at the end of each meal
Add up the calories at the end of each day

Ok, not so hard afterall.

I put the chart in a binder, and and then I can see when I'm eating low cal and high cal, and I see patterns (loads of tomatoes = laughably low; loads of chocolate = tearfully high)

Now, keeping track of low and high calorie days is in my favour, because what I've been doing is eating low (1200 - 1400) for 3 days, then high (1800 - 2000) on the 4th day, then start the cycle over again. This way, my metabolism freaks out when I feed it high calories on the 4th day, so it speeds up to burn them (muhaha!) and then it's still burning strong on the following day when I eat low calories. Hah hah! I have just succeeded in burning off extra calories, while adding fewer of them into my body. More fuel consumption - fuel addition = loosing stored fuel (ie fat) !

Why has this weight loss secret been kept from me my whole life?! Well, it hasn't. Honestly, counting calories is nothing new. I was just too foolish, too uninformed, and dare I admit too lazy to do it. And the trick about eating low then eating high isn't something that was invented yesterday, but it is something that I never really tried before... and yeah, I'm shocked that it's actually working (because usually I fail miserably at dieting, which makes me feel depressed, and then I binge, which makes me fatter... yeah, you get the idea.)


Eating 2000 calories in a day... not always so easy.

I'm a moderate vegan. By that I mean that I'm normally a strict vegan, with the exception of occasionally eating an organic egg. For those of you who don't know, a vegan is someone who avoids eating/using animal products. That means, no meat/seafood, no milk/dairy, no eggs, no honey, no gelatin, etc.

Vegetables and fruits are usually fairly low in calories, so on days when I have eaten great big salads stuffed with veggies a'plenty, tofu, and fresh fruits but not very many carby and starchy foods like noodles, rice, couscous, and taters... and I've managed to avoid the tin of chocolates... then it means I'm going to have a seriously low calorie day, despite eating enormous portions at every meal. There were a couple of days in my first week of this new diet (though I'm loathed to call it that, maybe lifestyle-changing-being-healthier-more-awake-way-of-eating-and-living is better, but waaay longer,) where I ate around 850 calories. On those days, I found it particularly exhausting to exercise, I felt tired in the early evenings and I had to take naps.

I've also come to realize that on an average day, I tend to eat 1200 - 1400 calories. On these days, I eat portions of carby/starchy foods like pastas, cereal, and taters, as well as nuts, dried fruits, beans, and occasionally an egg. When I eat well-rounded and nutritionally balanced meals that have both veggies/fruits, proteins, and carbohydrates, I feel better and have enough energy to get me through the day and sustain me through all those ab crunches and leg lifts, too.

The only days that I manage to eat 2000 calories are days when I have a meal that includes grossly inflated portions, like half a pizza or a pie, or double helpings of pasta, or high amounts of peanut butter, chocolate and sugar (yeah, that marble cake with almonds and fudge frosting totally put me over the top! But it was so freaking good... omg)

Because my metabolism is slower than it should be (lazy metabolism likes to stay in it's mossy cave, apparently) there's little chance that I'd be able to process 2000 calories everyday... it would mean bringing on the binges and the daily over-eats... yeah, that's how I was eating, and clearly, that was only causing suffering and unhealthiness.

As I've increased my exercise and increased my metabolism, I've noticed that I need those 1200 - 1400 calories, and I expect that it won't be long until I'm needing 1400 - 1600 a day. But, for the meantime, I'm sticking to the 3 low cal days, 1 high cal day cycle, because that is what's working... and working like a bleeping miracle!

<3