betsyschow

Snack Smart: My calorie budget

Several people have emailed me about my calorie budget, so here you go. Keep in mind, I am in a maintenance phase. I am not trying to lose any more weight, just stay balanced.

On a rest day where I have no exercise, I aim for 1750 calories. This is what I have found works the best for my body. You might need more, or less. Once you get to a healthy weight, you can tweak it and see. Here’s my usual breakdown.

Breakfast- 250 calories
Morning Snack- 200 calories
Lunch – 550 calories
Afternoon Snack- 100 calories
Dinner – 650 calories

If you guys are interested, I can post a few sample meals and snacks. On days where I run high miles I obviously need to eat a an extra 500 -700 calories depending on the exercise. But this is my typical day if I am just doing light cleaning at home and do nothing else physically.

Fitness Tip: Quality not Quantity

Have you ever seen those people that do like 200 stomach crunches a day? But their crunches are super fast and only come up part way.

Well guess what. If you did one songs worth of ab exercises, at rhythmic pace, you’d get a much better workout. First off, when you take your time, you create resistance and use strength of muscle as opposed to momentum. Secondly, if you use about 3 different ab exercises in one song, you can exercise upper, lower, and side abs.

Next week, I will post my favorite ab workout that’s helped me have a really strong core. For now just remember that it doesn’t matter how many repetitions you do, if your form is off. You won’t be working the right muscles or getting the most out of your time and sweat.

B is for Birthday

B is my all time favorite letter of the alphabet. Here are a few of my favorite B things.

Obviously, B is for Betsy. But it’s also for bear, baby, baboon bums, biscuits, and best of all…. birthdays.

My Birthday is in 2 days, I will be 30…again. My favorite birthday tradition is the Happy Birthday video texts. Each of my sister’s families and my in-laws SMS me a text video of them singing Happy Birthday as a family. The kidlet ones are cute and have the little extras like “Ohh lala” and “Cha cha cha”. The in-laws video is extremely off key and it’s become a matter of pride to see who’s video is the most ear shattering.

Then there’s the Birthday dinner. The one night a year where I take off all my food restrictions ad my hubby prepares all my favorites. This year it’s Sweet corn spoon bread, sweet potato, caramel mash, and Lion House Rolls. Life doesn’t get any better– until the weigh in the next day 😉

B is also for book. As in I have a deadline to meet and a book to finish writing.

What’s your favorite B word?

The Long Run: Breathe

A key to exercise and weight loss that is often overlooked… breathing.

When you are in the middle of something particularly hard

A is for AHHHHHH!!!

My other blog that I collaborate on is doing the A-Z Challenge, so I thought I would give it a try too, because it sounds fun. (gulp) So the idea is that you post a topic devoted to the next letter of the alphabet all through April. Except for the first one, there are no posts on Sunday. I am opting for the theme, “These are a few of my favorite things, A-Z”

So here goes, A is for AHHHHHH! Ahhh, is one of my favorite expletives. This whole blogging experiment is a scary idea, and a little intimidating. But if you have read me before, you know I am all about goals and challenges. They make you feel Alive and like you’ve really Achieved something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, A is also for my daughter’s pink stuffed Alligator Ally, that is need of immediate tail surgery.

What’s your favorite A word?

The Long Run: I am not a Camel

So I was going through pictures from a recent vacation and found this picture of my sister and my kids riding a camel. I had to explain to the five year why a camel had a hump and how they fill their hump. That reminded me of yet another animal that I may act like at times, but shouldn’t.

I have a bad tendency after a workout, or perhaps just lunch in general, to eat large quantities of food or breads in particular. I eat way way over the suggested serving size. Before my transformation, I would binge almost and not worry about the calories, just eat less for dinner. You can imagine how well this went. I would try to starve to make up for my overeating, and then binge again until I was overfull because I was so hungry. I was turning my self into a camel, only my hump was my big fat belly on the front.

Now I know better, and make sure I stay within my budget for the day. Yet I am still making this mistake with my portion control. By eating to much in one meal, my tummy gets overfilled and expands. It doesn’t feel very good. Not to mention, you body can only process and use so much food at a time, even after a big run. What do you think happens to all the carbs and proteins that the body can’t process? That’s right, it turns to fat.

That is one of the reasons we have all heard “experts” suggesting 5 small meals a day. It gives your body a chance to efficient process the fuel it’s been given. If I give my body more fuel than it can use at a time, it’s going to dump the excess, right on my bum, thighs and belly. Even if I am within my caloric budget for the day.

So I am standing up and saying no more. I am not a camel!! I don’t like feasting and gorging and feeling like crap afterwards. Wondering where the entire plate disappeared, or if I even remembered to chew. How is that satisfying? It’s not. So in about 5 minutes I am going on my long run, 15 miles today. And when I get back, I will find something to eat and savor every bite instead of shoveling it it and saving it in my hump for later.

Exercise for the Soul: Emotional Eating

My big fat waistline was a physical representation of an emotional issue. They were so inextricably linked, that I couldn’t solve one without the other.

I was happy– I needed cake to celebrate. Rough day– Ben and Jerry’s had a flavor custom made for the heart ache.

I personally had to take a good hard look as to why I was fat, and it wasn’t just because of a love of food.

Take a deep hard look at your eating habits and figure out if a love of butter is making you hefty. Or is it more that the self esteem issues are keeping you from getting thin?

Potpourri:10 pounds a year

Here’s a little something I read.

If you cut off 100 calories a day, (that’s either by limiting your snack intake or walking one mile a day), you should lose 10 pounds over the course of a year.

Conversely, if you add a 100 calories over your daily budget, you will gain 10 pounds a year.

Scary to think that 5 stinkin extra starbursts a day could make you gain 10 pounds if you do that for a year.

Dress for Success: If the Shoe Fits

Coolest shoes ever right? They look cool, but they’d be hell to run it.

Take it from somebody who knows, exercise wear starts with your feet. I’ve made ever mistake you can think of when it comes to shoes. I’ve bought clearance shoes that didn’t really fit, but they were cheap. I’ve bought the cutest shoes that didn’t have the right motion control. I’ve worn my shape-ups to run – never, ever, ever do this one!!

Do yourself and your feet a favor. Go to a real running shoe store, not walmart, and get fitted for shoes. Here’s an excerpt about my first running shoes from my book Finished Being Fat: An accidental adventure in losing weight and learning to finish coming to a bookshelf near you in January 2013.

According to all the experts, when you started running, the first thing you had to do was buy a good pair of running shoes. That couldn’t be too hard right? Go to the store get a cute size seven that’s cheap and be done with it. When I got the running store I found out how wrong I was. First question the clerk asked me was if I was an under or over pronater? I didn’t think that was any of his business. Then he guided me to the never ending wall of shoes. Apparently there was more to picking a shoe than just color choices. Each pair of shoes had a different purpose – ones for stability, motion control, extra cushion, racing flats, those barefoot thingies that look like socks. He explained the grave consequences of choosing the wrong shoe; arch problems, IT band problems, planter fasciitis, losing toenails, knee replacements.

It should be noted that I have a giant phobia of being wrong. It colors everything I do. I have trouble picking the restaurant because I’m afraid I’ll pick the wrong one and no one else will like it, or someone will get food poisoning and then it will be my fault because I picked the restaurant. I had been ok with choosing my own shoes when I only had to worry about matching my new running outfit. Now this guy was telling me that my choice had bigger consequences than just a fashion faux pas. That freaked me out! What if I made the wrong choice and crippled myself?

So as usual, I didn’t make a choice at all. I walked out of the store and started to run in my well loved, worn out hiking shoes. Turns out not making a decision was probably the worse decision I could make. Within a week my left knee hurt if I even thought about running. I had blisters on my heels, between my toes, and I think a blister might have started forming under my toenail if that was possible. Who knew hiking shoes did not make good running shoes? Aside from you and probably ninety percent of the population, my husband did. That’s why the next Saturday Jarom packed kids in the car and marched me back into the running center.

Of course the same clerk was there with a huge “I knew you’d be back” grin on his face. If he said I told you so, he could kiss his commission goodbye. Since I still had no idea what kind of shoe I needed, he had me try on a variety in the size sevens I requested. When I didn’t like the feel of any of those, he wisely decided to measure my feet and then disappeared in the back room. My best friend Misty had been preaching the religion of shoe shopping for years, but personally I thought this was more like purgatory than heaven. I looked over at Jarom, who was too busy taking a sports bra off my daughter Lily’s head to be of any help.

The clerk returned with a box that said Saucony. Since I have really bad eyesight, I read it as Saucy, so when he opened the box I expected the shoes inside to reflect that and be cute and “saucy” – maybe even pink. Boy was I wrong. They were ugly white sneakers with a blue slash on the side. But that was not the most offensive thing, the biggest problem was that the tag said size eight wide. Excuse me? Maybe I was being overly sensitive, but I was a little upset that this clerk thought that I had fat feet. When I pointed out that he had obviously grabbed the wrong size, he said nothing and laced them onto my feet.

And so on my twelfth pair of shoes I had a Cinderella moment. The skies opened up, angels sang a heavenly chorus, and I knew these ugly, expensive, most comfortable shoes on the planet would take me where I needed to go. I was in love.

I left that store two hundred dollars poor, but gained new insight. How many great things had I missed out on in life because I had been afraid of picking the wrong one? Never again would I let the fear of being wrong keep me from something I enjoyed. From then on when it was my turn to choose a place to eat, I was not going to defer to someone else and eat lukewarm Mexican. No, if I wanted sushi, then by golly we would have sushi and I would love it.