Thursday, February 28, 2008

Fueling the Furnace Yesterday and An Easy Run This Morning

Yesterday's Total Calorie Intake: 2810
(Exercise Calories:  916)
Total Net Calories:  1894

I felt like an eating machine yesterday.  Every few hours I was trying to eat to ensure I was getting enough fuel for recovery in an effort to not feel "flat" by the end of the week.  At 3pm, I took a look at my remaining calories and it was still over 1600!  In order to add some additional calories at the end of the day, I ended up having a dark beer (Black and Tan - yummmm), some fig newtons and rice crisp crackers in front of the TV.  Not the model of nutrition there - but at least it was all high-carb and low fat :-)

To put a little perspective on what I ate yesterday, I consumed over 2800 calories - 90% of my calories were from carbs, 11% fats and 9% protein.  Even with those percentages, I ate close to 69 grams of fat - when I went on my diet 4 years ago I was limited to 36 grams of fat per day.  I probably do need to bump the protein up a bit...I don't eat much meat - mainly only for our Shabbat meal on Friday night - so this won't be easy.  Especially since yesterday's foods included peanuts as a snack and yogurt with my dinner and I was still low in the protein department.

I received a comment on the blog regarding how I count calories (thanks to "the other Mike" for reading the blog and leaving a comment!).  I use the software from Calorie King.  I currently use it on my home computer but I also have a copy on my Palm Pilot that I used previously.  If you don't want to spot $45 to purchase the software, you can do a lot of it on your own with the Food Database on CalorieKing.com - it will just take more effort (you pay for it somewhere, right?).  Here's a previous post on the subject - or you can click on the "losing weight" tag in the "Label Cloud" on the right to get all of the posts that have something to do with losing weight.
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Today's run was a 4 miler at an easy pace.  Again it was dark, cold and windy this morning so I went to the gym - although I really longed to be outside.  I know that if today was a long run day I'd be pounding the pavement, but I just couldn't get motivated to bundle up this morning.  To add a little treadmill variety, I used the Cardio setting - basically, you tell the treadmill what your target heart rate is and starting speed, and the treadmill adjusts the incline to keep you around that heart rate.  (I'm able to do this workout since I wear a HRM strap and I don't need to hold on to the heart rate sensors on the treadmill).  I set the heart rate at 147 and the speed at 5.5 mph since that's where my recovery runs were yesterday.  I was able to keep this speed up until the last quarter mile when the treadmill reduced the speed to keep my heart rate from climbing.  The incline was about 3% for the first 1.5 miles, and then it went down to the 1% range for the remainder of the run.  I felt good afterwards...and hungry!

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