82: balancing act

So you think, "I ran X number of miles this weekend. I can eat whatever I want!" The nutritionist warned us that we might whisper this to ourselves. It's so easy to overcompensate and reward yourself not only on the day of your run, but for days after. In effect, you cancel out all the physical good of running by intaking gi-nor-mous amounts of calories. You feel like you should be shedding weight but in reality you are maintaining or (gulp) dare I say actually putting weight on! Like the nutritionist said, "Of course, treat yourself after the race! Just don't treat yourself every day for the whole next week."

Fortunately this hasn't happened to me (yet) but I have had the "I can eat whatever I want!" moments. I use this site called The Daily Plate to track net calorie intake (gross calories eaten less calories burned through activity) as a tool to work towards overall weight management. You input your height, weight and goal (for example, maintain weight or lose 1 pound a week) and it spits out what your net calorie goal per day should be. Then using the food journal, you track what foods and what activities you do each day to monitor yourself. It's a pretty eyeopening experience and tell you exactly what you should be cutting out all together (i.e. - a super grande carne asada taco salad with all the fixings - 1000+ calories) and what things are reasonable to splurge on occasionally (i.e. - a cone of Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough Ice Cream - 360 calories).

What is crazy is that after running for 130 minutes or 2 hours and 10 minutes straight for my long run this past Saturday, I had burned 1273 calories!! Basically I could eat twice my normal daily "allowance"...CRAZY...! It totally screws up your perceptions of good vs. bad and what to eat and what not to eat. You literally have to pull your reigns in and teach yourself how to have self control again when the next day when you are so sore you can barely walk, let alone work out, and therefore are not burning all the calories you think you deserve to eat just because of the activities of the day before!

So I'm back to reality and thankfully today, I squeezed in a 2 mile run...which justifies me to eat another 294 calories. Don't you love how I quantify exercising in terms of how much it means I can EAT?! I do.