Calorie Burning

It is a piece of irony that after deciding yesterday to let myself eat more, going from 1800 to 2000 calories a day, I had a day where I could have stopped at 1800 easily. For the first time in well over two weeks, I got to the end of dinner and found I’d only had 1625 calories throughout the day. Even with the rice pudding added, I was only just over 1800 calories! Now a large part of that is my decision to have an earlier lunch and skip the morning snack, so I’d have enough time for my workout in the afternoon, but I also managed to stay away from the chocolates and Doritos. Clearly for me, being busy and motivated controls my appetite!

One of the ironies of exercise and weight loss is that the fitter you get the harder you have to work to burn the same number of calories. I started my next 3 weeks of intensive training with a weight routine yesterday. While this has always burned fewer calories than I like, it would appear that 45 min now burns less than 200 calories, which does not bode well for losing any more weight. On the plus side, despite my lower resting heart rate, my higher muscle mass will keep my metabolism high, burning more calories per hour at rest. Simply put, it takes more calories to keep muscles going than it does fat cells, so the more muscles you have the higher your base metabolism. So you end up with this odd balance where the fitter you are, the harder you have to work to get your heart rate up during exercise in order to burn more calories, but the more calories you burn when you are not doing anything.

Which is why even though I am eating more, I may very well still manage to lose those last couple of pounds. Let’s hear it for the benefits of exercise!

The Score:

Calories:	Protein:	Carbs:	Fat:	Alcohol:	Fibre:
1995.37	125.46g	237.40g	60.60g	0	26.40g
	25%	48%	27%
Calories burned through exercise:		190

What I ate:

Time	Item	Amount
08:15	Vitamins - Centrum Advance A to Zinc, 400iu of Vitamin E, 1000iu Vitamin D3 and 500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 each
	Cold water	200mL
	Scrambled eggs	2 eggs
	Heinz Beanz, reduced sugar and salt	185g
	Mushrooms	110g
	in butter	5g
	Sainsbury's pressed apple and cherry juice	100mL
08:45	Black Tea	500mL
10:30	Raspberry and Echinacea tea	250mL
12:15	Homemade chicken and butternut squash risotto	300g
	Alpro soya original	200mL
	Fresh strawberries	77g
	Sainsbury's Be Good to Yourself chocolate mousse	62.5g
13:00	Green Tea	250mL
14:15	Resistance workout
	Citrus Nuun electrolyte tablet in water	750mL
15:15	Sponser Chocolate Recovery Shake	30g
	in Skim milk	225mL
18:30	Twinings Camomile, honey and vanilla tea	250mL
19:45	Baked salmon	98g
	Merchant Gourmet Red and White Quinoa	100g
	Kraft Light Honey Mustard dressing	10g
	Frozen peas	100g
	Muller rice pudding vanilla custard	190g
21:00	Sainsbury's fruit and seed mix	40g
22:00	500mg Glucosamine sulphate	1 pill

Plus 500 to 1500mL of cold water sipped from a water bottle throughout the day.