Count Calories, Save Money

Every few months or so I reflect on my poor diet and lack of exercise and get serious for approximately one week where I'm super diligent about keeping track of what I eat.  Not unlike personal finance, to "do better" you have to first get a clear picture of what you're doing, whether it be calories you're inhaling or money you're spending.  Without that knowledge your brain isn't going to make the solid connection of "boy that's a lot of money on x" or "thanks to the burger king for lunch, I'm not allowed to eat the next three days".

There are a million different ways to diet and if you look at me you'll know any diet advice I hand out should be  mostly ignored, but I tend to go for the simple approach.  If I want to shed some pounds I'm going to ignore my fat/protein/carb split and just do some old fashion calorie counting.  To oversimplify and ignore some exceptions, if it's high in calories it's probably not that great for you.  It's probably sugary, processed, fatty, fried, or all of the above.

Where'd all them calories get to

Just like being frugal with your money, you're first going to need to know where you're "spending" your calories.  Once you're dreams of eating 3 bags of cheetos a day are shattered, you're going to get a good idea of what your problems areas are and what needs cut from your gluttonous routine.  This is going to be difficult if you don't have easy access to a computer/smart phone, but I track my food consumption/exercise with the website (and smartphone app) Fat Secret.

Make that food your bitch

Here is the part where you're going to need to start planning ahead, what meals are safe for your diet, and if you're like me, what will produce ample left-overs to take for lunches.  I will admit, I hate trying to plan ahead, but it does really take the guesswork out of "what's for lunch/dinner?"  Congratulations, you're now practicing portion control as well.  Popular diet plans (Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Nutrisystem) simplify the calorie counting and portion control for you, but it's accomplishing the same thing.

Sweet, sweet financial reward

Finally, saving some money up in hurr.  You're now eating less, and planning ahead to make sure you're going to stay within your limits.  When you go to the grocery store you'll avoid impulse/snack purchases, and the aforementioned planning will give you a smaller shopping list with much less waste.  That's all well and good, but the biggest saving of eating less and planning more is you're going to eat out less because it typically carries a heavy caloric cost and most daily diets has no room for junk/fast food.  Bam.  Money saved.  In the 3dollarbicycle household, most of the reason where we go out to eat is because we're too lazy to figure out what we want to have for dinner.

Simple, boring, ????, profit!

While extremely boring, I will eat the same breakfast every day during the work week.  I'm lazy enough that I'm fine with the lack of creativity for trade off of a filling, easy breakfast that I don't need to prepare ahead of time.  I take coffee in from home, have some instant oatmeal and a sweet and salty granola bar thing.  Coffee always fills me up pretty good and the two spread out "snacks" carry me to lunch without much dramatic grumbling from my stomach.  Some argue a large breakfast, but at least this leaves me with a bunch of carlories left for the day.

Caveats

I try and head-off arguments and flaws in my logic ahead of time.  I'm not saying "eating healthy" and "counting calories" are necessarily the same thing.  You can very easily spend a lot of money on fancy organic foods that I don't know how to pronounce and in the end not save any money.  What I try to do is  stick to what I would consider "normal food" for me and just eat less of it.

Random dieting tips not necessarily tied to financial benefit

While most of these are pretty common sense, I thought I'd throw these out there that I've found are true for me

• Drink water.  It's calorie free and good for you.  "What about those zero calorie sodas, etc?"  I have no idea, but I assume they're still not good for you.
• Don't starve yourself.  If you think you're going to drop 20 lbs in two weeks by eating 500 calories a day, you're doing it wrong.  I'm told you're body needs to keep it's metabolism going and if you're starving yourself your body will slow your metabolism down to conserve calories, yes even if you're a fatty fat fat.
• Avoid eating late at night.  This could be just me, or that I weigh myself in the mornings, but if I stop my eating hours before I fall asleep I think the food gets processed quicker.  Also I get indigestion fairly often and dieting and not eating close to bed time has all but eliminated my nightly feast of tums.
• Rome (your fat ass) was not built in a day.  It's actually kind of discouraging to learn that one bad day of eating isn't going to make or break your diet, it's consistently eating more calories than you need that makes you gain weight.
• Find a sort of exercise that you enjoy.  If you're exercising, you can eat more calories!  Beware  however, that the calories actually burnt are far less than it feels, so 5 Big Macs are not a reward for a 3 mile walk.  

While the wife's away: Showerbeer Vol 1

Amber had an overnight training last week which gave me some time to myself.  Aside from the aforementioned showerbeer it was a pretty mild time.  After work on Wednesday I had my first experience picking up a baby from daycare all by myself.  Me, picking up a baby!  Shattering everyone's expectations, I delivered the baby on time and unharmed.

My next pickup and delivery task was to ask Gigi if she was a bad enough dude to stay at Casa Dreese overnight, and she accepted with a lot of enthusiasm, which could have been confusing to her since I was holding her leash.  I now realize my rookie mistake.

With Gigi at the house I didn't have to worry about the cats making any sort of disturbance since half of our cat population is deathly afraid of Gigi, while the other tries to play it really cool and show the other one how brave he is.  

Since Gigi and I both share the fact that we're big both fat fatties now adays, I thought it would be a great opportunity to do the big loop around the house, which I've rode on my bike before, but not walked.  It was a gorgeous day so I figured why not.  It took us about an hour and 16 minutes to cover the 4.4 miles, which isn't too bad considering the elevation changes.

It was nice to have Gigi around to force me into taking her for walks, but at much as I love her it just further solidifies the fact that I don't think I'm ready for a dog now, nor do I think I will be anytime soon.

Week 1 of P90X

With Amber's volleyball season starting and me not helping out this year, I thought it was a good time to find something to keep me busy for the next three months. I've been toying with the idea of doing P90x for a while, and I've finally run out of excuses.

Going into it, all I've heard about it is that it's pretty grueling for a home exercise routine. Each session is at least an hour long (6 days a week, no less), which is a fairly substantial amount of time in this lazy-man's opinion. On the other hand, I suck at working out on my own, so having someone tell me what to do would probably be the only way for me to keep honest.

The x in P90x is supposed to stand for extreme, I guess it sounded better than P90e. Its supposed to be an exercise routine for people in some sort of shape, which is surprisingly a category I fall into. There is a fitness test that you're supposed to do to see if it's the right workout for you, but of course I skipped that. How bad could it be?

The first few weeks are as follows:

• Day 1: Chest and back - Lot's of pushups and pullups. I can do pushups ok, but I've always been terrible at pullups.
• Day 2: Plyometrics - More like suckometrics, amirite? This is a cardio session with tons of jumping, squatting and lunging. An hour worth of your heart wanting to stop, basically. This was the toughest workout for me, by far.
• Day 3: Shoulders and arms - This wasn't very difficult for me, I expect I would get a lot more benefit if I were using free weights instead of resistance bands.
• Day 4: Yoga - I've always been intrigued by yoga, mostly in the train-wreck sort of way since I am extremely inflexible. I cheated really bad, I only did 30 minutes of this 90 (!!!) minute session. Partially because I was getting my ass kicked, but mostly because it was so freaking long and we were having company that night.
• Day 5: Legs and back - I don't remember this one all that much, did I black out? If this is the one with one-legged wall squats I hate it. More pullups this day as well.
• Day 6: Kenpo X - This is basically P90x tae-bo. It wasn't incredibly difficult and the hour did go pretty fast.

On the bright side I'm happy that I stuck to it and did indeed do a whole week of the program, however don't quite sing my praises yet. I found out I was supposed to be doing a separate ab routine 3 days a week after the main workouts, and I still haven't done one yet. My excuse at first was that I didn't know, and now my excuse is "Come on, I just worked out for an hour! I wanna be done!"

I've also completely ignored everything diet-wise in the program, actually you could say I've been (embarrassingly) eating even worse than before. I completely acknowledge that diet is probably the biggest part to getting and staying fit, but shit man, FOOD! I'm hoping that my diet can slowly start to match up with exercise and I can find a reasonable middle ground.

Overall I'm fairly pleased with the program even though the main trainer, Tony Horton is extremely annoying after just the first week (let alone having to watch the same stupid jokes over and over for the next 11 or so weeks). I don't remember ever being so sore for so long (my lower triceps hurt for 5 or 6 days), but there is that whole no pain no gain thing (no doubt made up by someone who was already in really good shape).

Unfortunately, it goes without saying that my bicycle riding will be taking a hit thanks to this new program. Doing 1-1.5 hour worth of exercise down in the basement leaves precious little time for eating up the miles on the road. I'm going to still try and throw some rides in there, but they will probably be few and far between.