1800

Eighteen hundred.

That number represents a limit…the total amount of calories I should be consuming in one day if I am wanting to safely lose weight.

The cheeseburger and fries, seen in that featured image above, narrowly exceeds that 1,800 calorie mark. While I feel I should mention that I didn’t take that exact picture, I will admit that I have had that exact meal before…at that same chain restaurant…as just one of three meals that I ate on that day.

Frankly, it’s a darn tasty meal…

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…and a meal that I should probably rarely, if never eat again.

That does make me a bit sad…but, brighter things await with a new healthier me, right… or so I’m told

To live within my nutritional means requires two things that very much go hand in hand: discipline and budgeting.

Much like keeping track of your finances, budgeting your calories requires a degree of mindfulness and planning so that things are kept in check.

With our money, if we’re not careful, spending could get out of hand and we might find ourselves in trouble. The same holds true with our daily nutrition…except I find it a bit more invisible.

My daily budget of calories is 1,800, but it’s not like I have a tangible view on 1,800 tasty calorie-bites waiting for consumption. I just see food. And that food has varying densities of nutrition and caloric mass, so to speak. This means I need to choose wisely what I consume. But not only what I eat… but when, as well. This requires planning and then discipline to stick to the plan.

So, I’ve just typed a whole lotta words…

…but what does this actually look like…practically?

To help me budget and keep track of what I’m actually eating, I use an application called MyFitnessPal. I shared about this app in the previous post about finding tools. In this app, I’ve structured my day to have 6 meals: breakfast, snack-1, lunch, snack-2, dinner, snack-3.

I try to balance my calories across those meals to get me through the day without feeling hungry or deprived. As I prepare a meal, or eat a food during one of those mealtimes, I log it in the app, and it automagically subtracts the calories of that food from my remaining calories for the day.

As long as I’m faithful to enter my foods into the app, then I’ll always know where I stand, and how many calories I have left in my day.

This requires a commitment of honesty. Coming soon, I’ll write an entire post about the importance of accountability and honesty… not only with others, but first and foremost with yourself. I could sneak food and not log it. My nutritionist will NEVER find out! But, my body will respond to, and process, that food…just as it was designed to do.

So, what does a typical day look like for me, nutritionally speaking that is. Here’s a quick snapshot example of how my day looked on May 2, 2017. In total, I ate 1,726 calories on that day.

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Breakfast – 357 calories

• cottage cheese
• nonfat greek yogurt with blackberries and granola
• 1 egg (fried using cooking spray)
• Tomato
• coffee with half-and-half

Snack 1 – 140 calories

• Carrots and green peppers
• Sabra taco hummus
• Sabra veggie guacamole

Lunch – 229 calories

• Kale salad with carrots, tomatoes, cucumber, onion, chia seeds, balsamic vinegar
• Pepper jack cheese

Snack 2 – 310 calories

• Clementine orange
• HMR Benefit Nutritional Bar – Lemon Crisp flavor
• Gouda cheese

Dinner – 690 calories (this was a bit high compared to how my ‘normal’ dinners go)

• Pork chop
• Sweet potatoes
• Sauteed zucchini

Snack 3

• No snack on this day. (often times I’ll have a small piece of 85% chocolate, if I have enough calories to spare)

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For the sake of space on this post, I condensed each meal into total calories for that meal. For more details into how the individual items of each meal impacted calories, you can check out this PDF report from MyFitnessPal on exactly how that day worked out.

I’m toying around with the idea of posting my weekly nutrition and exercise logs to this blog. More on that in the weeks to come.

As I close, let’s check in with the Grail Knight from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and get his thoughts on my nutritional choices I shared here…

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Attributions

• Featured image: “Five Guys Burgers and Fries” flickr photo by chief_huddleston shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
• Batman crying animated gif used via Fair Use
• The Ellen Show animated gif used via Fair Use
• Indiana Jones animated gifs used via Fair Use