Nutrition and a spooky time.

My nutrition has been considerably better over the last week and a bit since I worked out a plan in my training log over at JPfitness.com. My weight has levelled off back at 211 or so, which is more in line with where it should be, which brings me to one of my favorite rants.

I weighed in at 219lbs after what I am calling the thanksgiving free for all. We are talking chips, salsa, guacamole, wine, gunniess, turkey, potatoes with cream AND sour cream, sweet spuds, salads, pickles, broccolli, pumpkin pie, egg nog, whipped cream, and gingerbread cake. THEN we took a pie home and Shannon and I polished it off within a day plus some more egg nog. I ate quite a bit of food and drank my share of alcohol. 219lbs on the Tuesday morning I worked out. I was at most 213lbs or so before I went into the weekend.

So I gained 6lbs over Thanksgiving. Or did I? I have heard a tonne of people I work with, I was doing so well, I lost 5lbs or I lost 10 lbs and then I went on vacation or whatever and put it all back on, usually it's over the course of a weekend.

The numbers aren't 100% accurate but let's run them anyhow. We need to consume/expend 3500 extra calories to lose or gain a lb of fat.....a choclate bar is around 250calories. So for me to have gained 6lbs over 3 days, I would have had to have eaten 21000 calories....EXTRA. I already need around 2500 or so to maintain my current body. So to gain 6lbs I would have had to have eaten around 9500 calories each of those days. The equivalent of 38 chocolate bars, a DAY. Good luck.

Is it possible to do? I am sure it is, is it likely? No I don't think so, It would be like eating a 600 calorie meal every hour for 16 hours.

What is more likely? Your body is working through all the crap you gave it. Your body is jacked full of salt and it's retaining water. You drank to much alcohol and not enough water, your body is dehydrated and is holding back the water.

Thursday came up, yes 2 days later, I weighed myself on the same scale at the same time of day, 211.5lbs, I lost 7.5 lbs! woo hoo!

Nutrional plans are long term plans, if you look at the scale everyday and the fluctuations, even if they are 10lbs, are your measure of progress you will be done before you even start.

I would recommend the following: only weighing yourself once a week and making a graph to track your overall trend over some period of time, weighing everyday and averaging the results and again....graphing them over a peroid of time or you could not weigh yourself at all, measure your dimensions. Check how big your gut is and again, plot these measurements over some time.

I often tell people I lost 2lbs steady a week when I lost my weight. I also fluctuated as much as 10lbs in a day. On the scale in the morning: 256, at night: 266.

It's a long term choice, anyone who promises you fast results is a liar.

I just looked through my training journal to find some information I want to share with you. At the beginning of the year I went to the dentist and was given bad news, I had a lot of cavities, and I don't mean 3. I mean like 6, and one root canal at least. Crap I stopped drinking diet pop on the SPOT. Over time I would have one in restaurants, how bad can one pop be? Soon it was 1 every second day. Then one a day, and then 2 or 3 a day and BAM I am drinking a crap load of it again, I am buying it buy the case to save money, so I have something to drink in the fridge. I don't really subscribe to the whole Aspartame will make me stupid theory, but I couldn't have had water or tea? Nope diet pop. I took a look back in August and thought DAMN IT! I stopped it again. My first Diet pop day was August 16th, 2006. It's now October 14th, 2006. I haven't had a diet pop in 2 months. Why am I sharing this now? Well I used to track the number of days I had gone without one and then I stopped. A couple of days ago though I realized I hadn't even contemplated buying one in quite sometime. Small victories.

I also stopped drinking coffee again, I was consuming WAY to much of it since being back in school, to the tune of 2 or 3 large cups a day. I have upped my green tea intake and cut my coffee off. I will probably one day have the occasional coffee as a treat, but I want to avoid drinking a million gallons a day.

Enough about my food habits, so here is something different. It is now Saturday Oct 14th, Halloween is around the corner. Shannon is having a party on the 28th, I have no real costume ideas. Oh I have one that would be cool, but I am just not sure I can toss together a Minotaur costume in 2 weeks with school and work! :D

And I can't leave an entry out without letting you all know about school.

We had 3 tests this week. A rock test where we are given a sample of a rock, which we have already seen, and we have to name it, classify it as Sedimentary, Igneous or Metamorphic, and give 2 properties we can see. Fairly easy test given we have seen all the samples before. However one rock looks like another a lot of the time. Rhyollite and Andesite are a perfect example. Two igneous rocks, both are volcanic, one is slightly darker colored and termed an intermediate rock (Andesite), where as rhyollite is a felsic rock. No problem if I have them sitting next to each other. Which they were not on the test of course. Still think I did ok.

We had a Math quiz as well, I mentioned this in my blog last week. I worked long and hard on the stupid related rates cone volume problems. I was ready to take names and chew bubblegum. What was on the test? A frickin' sphere. Now you have to understand that in a cone question we have a conical tank and it is being filled with water or sand, so we basically have a small cone within a big cone. And as the water gets deeper, ie the small cone get's bigger, it also gets a wider radius at the mouth. So height changes, so does the radius. Far more interesting question. I spent hours learning how it worked, looking crap up on line. But we get a sphere. As the sphere get's bigger it's radius increases. NOTHING else. boring. ie it was a Mickey Mouse question.

And last but not least we had our Geophysics pre-test on Friday. At the beginning of the week John (Our instructor) did a little review and then gave us a mock test in the lab. There was stuff on there I knew he had mentioned in class but come on it was in PASSING, because someone asked a question! AGH! So I sorta think about panicking, and even do for a day or so. By Thursday we had a little review with John and I added a total of 3 or 4 flash cards to my deck and ran the cards through a couple times on Thursday night.

On Friday Morning I get to the school at 7am or so and by 7:10 there is three guys studying geophysics with me. So I run my cards one last time. I go to Math and the Computers and then everyone disappears again. We have an hour before the test so I grab the MP3 player and a tea, go and eat my lunch outside, do a little 10 minute walk around campus and go back to my locker I am bored and it's 12:30 now. Hmm What to do. Oh I'll look up what a critical angle actually is, I know how to calculate it, but can't recall what it is exactly. Jimmy had asked me how to caluclate it earlier and I told him, but said, couldn't tell you what it is though. I look up from my notebook and around the corner comes Jimmy. The first thing I say is, "The critical angle is the angle the refracted ray travels along the boundary between two layers". He says, oh. And informs me that half the class is madly studying for this test. 30 minutes before the test and they are madly studying. Man they need to seriously calm done. I think I benefited from my relaxed mindset more than they did from studying. I looked up one thing in that hour. It was on the test. I wonder how much they looked at was on the test?

Anyhow, I destroyed that test, I feel more confident in this one than I did about my geology test. I don't know what I got wrong on this one, ie I think I got everything, I can't say that for geology.