Sunday, November 06, 2005

Five Day Diet Update

I completed logging five days of my food. My diet next week will be atypical because I'm traveling, so I thought I'd take a checkpoint now. I've just eaten what I normally do, with no effort to game or skew the results positively - which of course would be bad. After all, anybody can log a perfect diet over one week, I'm more interested in what I'm really eating.

This nutrition diary and logging effort is very interesting. How'd I do? Okay I suppose, but there is room for improvement.



5 Day Diet
RecommendedWhat I Ate
Calories18022843
Carbs216.4 g455.6 g
Fat53.4 g74.9 g
Protein114.0 g93.5 g
Fiber25.0 g18.3 g


This was a major jolt of reality! I'm way over on carbs and fat, and not getting enough protein or fiber. It looks like a dietary disaster, except for the fact that I also burned an average of 1055 calories per day through exercise (as estimated by the diet diary). This means instead of a daily surplus of 1041 calories (i.e. gain a pound every 3.4 days), I am barely under by 14 calories (i.e. lose a pound every 250 days). Since many of the counts depend on volume estimates, I'm not sure I can log to that precision. The good news is that it appears I am eating and exercising to maintain my weight, more or less.

However, I need to juggle my diet and get more protein and fiber, while cutting back on fat. Carbs will always be in surplus because those are what give me energy for exercise.

I'll keep logging and get a good month of data before I look into sweeping changes. For now I'll just try to eat healthy, and think of decreasing carbs and fat while increasing protein and fiber. Nutrition tracking is so interesting!

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