Day 6

This morning I ended up walking out of the house without eating or weighing. Not eating was accidental, not weighing had more to do with not wanting to get discouraged with a couple of days to go in the first week.


Today I had lunch at Qdoba. I had a naked burrito with steak, with a small bit of cheese and sour cream. Assuming that the chese and sour cream were half portions (which they were at most), this is a 685 calorie meal per Qdoba's web site. That was more than I expected. I assumed this was about a 500 calorie deal. In fact, I was only marginally better off than I would have been ordering my typical three steak soft tacos, full cheese and sour cream. That only clocks in at 705. Ordering pinto as opposed to black beans would have saved 100 calories. Also (and I knew this going in) ordering chicken instead of steak would have made negligible to no difference. My guess is they just don't give you as much steak.

A quick thanks for checking out the blog. I've had almost 300 hits since starting my counter on Wednesday, easily more than I've had in any week on http://ukfootballfan.blogspot.com/, where I do the majority of my writing from August through January. I also appreciate the notes of encouragment and advice.

A word about diet advice. It generally breaks down into two categories. First, you hear a lot about how or exactly what one should or shouldn't eat to stimulate weight loss. Some of this advice makes sense, avoid XYZ because it contains wasted calories, avoid ABC because it is far worse for you than you might realize.

There are some limits to the efficacy of this advice. There is only one way to lose weight: Burn more calories than you consume. How does one do this? Eat less, exercise more. That's it. We could go out and buy one of 10,000 diet books on the market, but I just saved us all some dough instead. So how you get there has to be a personal choice guided by some common sense and good practices, but more importantly, a ton of discipline. The advice about what to eat is only good if it is reasonable and can be followed by the listener. And knowing what to eat is seldom the root problem. An adult who doesn't realize eating a Monster Thickburger and fries is a bad idea probably has bigger issues than weight.

This is why I find the second form of advice more interesting, to wit: how to reconfigure lifestyle to facilitate weight loss. This is things like, "keep almonds at your desk so you won't hit the snack machine at 3:30", "stop after two pieces of pizza" or "take the stairs". Sure, this kind of stuff alone isn't going to get it done, but there are solid building blocks. Why do I like this more? Consider this:

Your single female friend always hooks up with the wrong guys. You can give her two forms of advice. Which one is better?

"You shouldn't date Bob. He is a drunk who is always checking out other girls and would rather spend weekend nights with his buddies than you."

or

"Maybe you should go somewhere besides bars to meet men."

If you've had any life experience at all, you know how successful the former is. The latter may be cheesy and cliche, but it contains a nugget she at least has to consider.