Weight Game

As the years pass, my weight gets farther from where I want it to be. So I tabulated my calories on Saturday, curious to see why my weight is high. My total calories were 1505 and I wasn’t hungry when I went to bed. Here’s the breakdown:

	Calories	Protein (g)	Carb (g)	Fat (g)
Breakfast	330	8	22	24
Lunch	515	29	27	55
Dinner	330	21	50	5
Snack	330	16	27	17
Totals	1505	74	126	101

I know three of those meals look suspicious. Breakfast, Dinner, and Snack were each 330 calories, as if I just made up the numbers. But they really were 330 each. Lunch was where my calories blew up. I had a tuna salad sandwich for lunch (240 cal) but then I ate 2 cinnamon toasts (275 cal). And the reason the cinnamon toast calories were so high was the butter (140 cal).

Even so, 1505 calories for the day isn’t terribly high. But how many calories should I be consuming? I went to the UK’s National Health Service website, where they have an interactive BMI calculator. I filled in the form with my height, weight, age, sex, ethnic group, and activity level, and it told me the amount of daily calories I should have. It says I need to lose 1 – 2 pounds a week and to do that I need to reduce my calorie consumption to 1716 – 2206 per day.

In other words, in order to lose weight I need to eat more calories than I am currently eating.

See, I have a problem with that. I don’t think that eating more food will help me lose weight.

So we come to Sunday. I skipped breakfast. For lunch I ate a tuna salad sandwich and a 4 oz serving of pineapple. I haven’t drunk any liquids today. At 6PM I’m still at 201 on the scales. I’m not hungry. I’m now drinking my first mug of water. But then along comes dinnertime.

My freezer holds two “Hungry Man” dinners. One is Salisbury Steak (essentially 2 ground beef patties with some veggies) and the other is Country Fried Chicken (breaded chicken with veggies). Both come with dessert. They’re probably great tasting and good for physically active people. But the Salisbury dinner has 590 calories and the Chicken dinner has 530 calories. What was I thinking when I bought these dinners? I obviously wasn’t thinking.

So I heated the Salisbury dinner. It wasn’t bad at all: Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and brown gravy plus green beans. And a chocolate brownie. Afterward, I took 2 slices of bread and spooned the remaining brown gravy onto them. On the way to midnight I got hungry and ate two bowls of raisin bran. Tasty. And at bedtime, I ate two tablespoons of peanut butter because—why not?

	Calories (g)	Protein (g)	Carb (g)	Fat (g)
Breakfast	0	0	0	0
Lunch	320	22	41	21
Dinner	710	21	46	33
Snack	530	17	78	21
Totals	1560	60	165	75

Sunday’s food consumption chart is a bit low on protein and high on carbs. Almost half the calories are from fat, which isn’t good. I told myself I will do better, knowing as I did that I was whistling in the wind. But on the upside, my calorie count for the day was still in the 1500s. Yay for me.

Maybe I need to be doing more of the dreaded E-word. (As if that’s going to happen.)