The Fat Boy Sandwich

I am in the midst of the dreaded Hallmark hallway of death (from November to Mother’s day…and this time…right now…is the Fat Boy Sandwich.  The Sandwich is the time between Valentines Day and Easter…when you quite haven’t finished your Valentines candy and you get smacked with the Easter candy.  Yes my friend…the damn Peeps are in the stores as we speak.

It’s been a while.  I have lots of posts running around my head, but really it is a matter of daylight…or time that I can keep my eyes open.  So let’s go…

Ahhh the Pepsi Corporation…

This week was Max’s school vacation week and one of the days he chose to go to Chuck E Cheese…ahhh the home of fine cuisine.  Needless to say we got drinks and I found myself staring blankly all of the non-options.  I know…I know…there ar little buttons you can get regular water from…and even soda water…but I just found it amazingly overwhelming that 99 percent of the ad space in front of your face contained sugar…it was stunning.  So I ask Max, “Do you see where to get water anywhere here?”…”What water daddy?”  Can’t blame him…he’s 5 and never gets to drink soda anyway and was blinded by the opportunity to have soda anyway…but still…it’s hard to find.   From a branding perspective…mission accomplished.

Nestle Toulouse

I have been pretty proud of myself since I have gone off of sugar.  It’s not that I don’t get cravings…cuza they come on wicked bad sometimes.  Usually it’s because I am bored, tired, or depressed…and I find myself wandering the kitchen looking for stuff.  But here’s the rub…there is a 1/2 open bag of chocolate chips in the pantry that I havent tried to crush yet.  A few weeks ago I opened the pantry door to get something out for one of the kids and a cloud of chocolate chips hit me with a big fat nasal slap.  I have been good, pulled them out…and put them back.  I would say that for the most part I am about 95% sugar-free.  I am good with the overt sugar…and am working on the covert sugar.  Even if I do eat something a bit sweet I can feel when I need more…and then stop.

Where’s the stuffing?

I have found that I over-eat by habit.  I can rationalize the fact of training so much for so long that it was impossible not to go into caloric deficit.  But now life is a different story.  So I began doing something I have always been challenged by…and not very successful at.  I began counting my calories.  Easy solution right?  Harder than I thought….and a big wake up call.  I started using a iPhone application called My Fitness Pal…not a whole lot of reasearch…it just works right and has a web-based site as well…suprisingly it has tons of food items (and random ones at that) so it makes things easier to track.  I guess I had no idea about calories in…and here’s my beef:  cereal…1/2 a cup for oatmeal…3/4 of a cup for some others…I have been used to eating double or maybe trip that amount.  Almonds?  24 almonds is a serving.  24?  What?  The idea of how little I need to eat from a serving perspective just blew me away.  When I was training for Ironman one of the grand experiments is to 1) find out how much you can eat with an elevated heart rate…and then 2) find out how little you needed to eat without bonking…but I never worried about the serving size…what a weird conundrum.

One of the reasons I like My Fitness Pal is because it starts out with a given amount of calories in the morning and every time you eat something it subtracts what you ate and you know where you stand…eat too much at one meal or snack…annnnnd…welllllll…you gotta eat less.  It’s taken me about 2 weeks to kind of recalibrate what I need.  it’s interesting and like I said…a wake up call.  So basically I am trying to create a negative caloric deficit…without feeling like I have to eat my fist most of the time…

So next we talk about the training…cuz I have fallen into a pretty interesting paradigm that fits for me…

let me know how you are doing, Charlie@4seasonfitness.com

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