Diet Analysis

So taking apart the basics of my diet from last week there are a few things I expected, and a few I didn't.


Not surprises:

• Free lunches are easily abused, but still they need to give me a bigger tray so that I can pile everything on without spilling juice into my soup.

• My cooking is really lazy during the week, but a bit better at the weekend.

• When I am cooking or baking at home, I throw ridiculous amounts of calories into things. 

• I eat a lot of carbs.

• No supplements, no magic potions, no placebo pills.

• The number of calories I put in are very close to the number of calories I put out, hence the general stability in my weight as long as I am eating and training "normally". 

• The number of calories I put in, and out, are ~30% more than an average adult male needs, so no surprise that my weight moves rapidly if I don't exercise, or don't eat.

Surprises:

• Packet "portion" sizes are tiny. What is written on most packets as a "portion" is generally about half of what I would consider to be a portion. Judging by what other people put on their plates I am not alone, and I think that portion sizes that manufacturers write on packets are nonsense.

• Food labelling in general is terrible. I like to think I am smart but sometimes I had real problems trying to figure out what calories were actually in things. Sometimes the labels are really hard to find. Then labelling everything "per 100g" and "per serving (200ml)" seem sensible enough, but on a 470ml bottle are meaningless. Who drinks 42.5% of a milkshake and calls that a portion? How much bread is 100g? How many haribo are 100g? [answers are: no-one, two slices, 11 mini packets]

• I make my "5-a-day", and quite often a lot more. I expected to come up close or short there but I am way clear even before you factor in the portion sizes. I am probably closer to 8-10 on most days. I count about 53 "portions" through last weeks tracker, even allowing for their funny rules that you can only count one glass of fruit juice a day no matter how many you have, and you can't count potatoes if they are the main starch in a meal but you can if there is another (e.g. rice or bread). So averaging almost 8 portions of fruit and veg a day.

• 90% of my coffees are pre-lunch.

• Big training days do not match up with big calorie intake days. Nor are they inverted, I did wonder if I ate more on rest days, or the day after big training days. But there doesn't really seem to be any correlation.

• Not as much junk food during the week as I expected. But plenty of crisps and sweets creep in at the weekends. I think a lot of this is just because I am bored rather than really hungry.

• Not really a surprise to me, but this one will get some people. Health food is not healthy. The 9-bar I had post-ride on sunday was similar calories to a Mars bar, but is about half the size! The homemade flapjacks, are made of oats, honey, dried fruit, a bit of coconut, and some sugar, but they calorie count is huge for their weight.

Calorie Comparison

So in a week I eat about 24,000 calories. And no weight change (within 0.1kg on the scales I have) over the week so everything I put in, I also put out.

An average adult male allegedly burns 2,500 a day just breathing and pumping blood and that sort of stuff. So I score somewhere around 17,500 just for being alive.

The other 6,500 I exercise away. Mapmyrun rates my formal training from last week as 5,523. 

Somewhere through the week there is a 1,000 point mismatch. Some of this is going to come out in the estimates of calorie numbers, both in and out. Some of it is my penchant for intentionally taking stairs instead of the lift, parking at the far end of the car park and walking around to talk to people at work rather than emailing and little things like that.

Changes

So having tracked for a week and done a quick analysis, what changes am I going to make?

Well, none. 

I like what I eat, and I eat what I like. As long as I am exercising sufficiently I am controlling my weight and staying healthy then there is no real drive to change. In fact trying to change is likely to be more problematic as any change I make is likely to drop something critical out of my diet by accident. 

For example, I could cut some or all of the lattes, but at 75 calories each I could quickly end up in calorie debt and start dropping weight again.

This may get a revisit in about June though, once I start looking at what useful weight I want to carry around a half ironman and what I can afford to get rid of.