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Tuesday, January 18, 2005
Food no-no’s = cooking opportunities
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
No sweet tea. No dinner rolls. No sugar. No ribeye steak. It seems that everywhere I turn, someone is telling me “If you want to lose the weight, this is a no-no.”
That was the case when we all went to meet with dietician Rachel Brandeis. A lot of the things I thought I was doing right, I found out I could be doing better with. For example, once a week I pick up a ribeye steak & baked potato at Kroger & cook it at home. Well, now I need to change that to a leaner cut of beef and a sweet potato. Or even a piece of fish & some steamed veggies. Slowly but surely, these are the things that will make a difference. It is hard at first, but as with any lifestyle change, once you get used to it, you never realize what it was like before.
The food changes are the toughest, but at the same time, I see it as a great thing. I love to cook and this is forcing me to open up my cookbooks to recipes I never thought I would use. Or, sometimes even better, putting a new and healthier spin on an old recipe. The old trial and error in the kitchen looks like I will be coming up with some new family favorites!
And thanks to my friend Charlie for sending me this great link to a site that gives you the nutritional information about a lot of different foods out there (http://www.nutritiondata.com). Tools like this certainly make you realize exactly what you are cooking & eating. I hope this comes in handy for me!
Working out has not been coming along as well as I had hoped. My willpower is not as strong as I want it to be & I find myself easily caving in to excuses like, “I will work out twice as hard tomorrow!” or “I had a long day & I will not be able to give it 100% at the gym.” Last week I think I only made it into the gym twice. This week I made it in yesterday and I am about to go again today after I post this blog. I know I need to increase my muscle & melt away the fat if I really want to be successful.
My progress so far: I have lost 11 pounds and my body fat percentage has fallen 3 points.
So far, so good! Let’s get better & keep it up!
Drew Wilkinson
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My goal: Burning more than I eat
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Week II was another pretty good week.
My weekly calorie deficit was about 7,000 calories. This was a little less than last week (I wrote that it was 7,000 last week but it was closer to 10,000) and I haven’t stepped on the scales yet today.
My total training volume this week was about 14 hours which is about what my average volume is over the course of the year. During the week I swam x 3, lifted weights 1x (I pulled something so I took one day off weights), biked twice and ran couple of time. This weekend I (along with some clients and colleagues) rented a house in the GA mountains and rode mountain bikes for two days. We had a long 4 hour day (including a one hour night ride) and only a 2 hour day the next day.
On the long day I was careful about what I ate (I took in 1200 calories in fluids and fuel on the bike) but had a pretty good breakfast and a huge lasagna supper and burnt 4000 calories on the bike so I had a good deficit. We were pretty trashed the second day so we only rode for a couple of hours. I got careless and had 4 cookies that I found out had 230 calories EACH so after we fueled for the ride, had our daily meals, I ate more than I burned by almost 900 calories. Still OK because the week was not bad overall.
Monday is an off day (no exercise to recuperate and recover). I almost always eat 1000 calories more than I burn on an off day — I think my body needs the calories to repair but it is also just because I am around the house more.
Permalink | | Categories: Chris Andrus
