To Count or Not To Count

You can normally break weight-loss down into a pretty damn simple equation. To lose weight, you need to burn more calories than you take in. Seems easy enough, right?

Well, yes and no.

It can be incredibly hard to accurately track your caloric intake versus outtake. Yay for apps and #science and all that, but human beings are not robots that always have a standardized caloric burn rate set at the factory. There are averages, and they can be generally calculated by your height & weight, but those are still estimations. Think about those friends you know that can eat WTFever they want and still are skinny as a rail. Unless they have a stomach worm (ew) they probably have a higher metabolism, meaning they are naturally burning calories faster than you. Lucky bitches.

Before we start yelling at all the skinny people though, the point is actually that not only does caloric burn vary by person; it also varies for the same individual over the course of their life. Basically, it’s inconsistent.

Even if you can narrow down your daily caloric burn to a fairly accurate estimate, there are still external factors. What food you eat can rev or slow your metabolism. You can also burn additional calories through exercise or really any sort of activity that gets your heart rate up.

But let’s pretend that you figure that shit out pretty well too, and you start counting calories to make sure you’re falling under that caloric burn each day. You can eat whatever you want, right? A calorie is a calorie is a calorie.

If your only goal is to lose weight this actually isn’t false logic. That’s why people can do ridiculous things like only eat Chipotle for a year or go on the Twinkie diet and not gain all the weight in the world. I really think it should go without saying that this doesn’t mean it’s actually doing your body good. Most apps that offer caloric tracking also show you the macro calculations, so that you can make sure your calories aren’t all falling under the FAT portion of the chart. Different diets suggest different combinations of fat, protein, and carbs, but it’s pretty easy to edit your goals to stick to the diet you’re following.

So having said all that, assuming you have the knowledge and approach your caloric tracking the right way, I should be in favor of it. And hell, if it works for you, woot! Congrats! You do the thing!

But I don’t think it works for me.

What’s weird about this is again, if your only goal is weight-loss, I have to say tracking my food works in the sense that I LOSE WEIGHT LIKE A SONNABITCH! I first noticed then when I added food tracking to my jazzercise routine, and the pounds FLEW off. It was miraculous! It was justification! I looked great!

I felt awful. My perfectionist crazy went, well, crazy.

Here’s why I find calorie tracking problematic:

•  It’s a fun sucker. There is nothing better at killing the joy in life than to realize that your favorite macaroni and cheese is LITERALLY MORE CALORIES THAN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO EAT IN A DAY. #TearsForYears
• It’s hard to be accurate, which makes it frustrating. Especially when you’re eating out. While restaurants are generally getting better at including calorie counts, you need to read the fine print. They rarely include the calories for additional parts of the meal. If you prefer to eat at local restaurants, good luck! And figuring out the calorie count for home-made meals is enough to ruin* the fun of cooking (I assume, I don’t actually find it fun in the first place so it’s really a shitty situation all around). In desperation you may turn to pre-prepared meals that gleefully announce their calories and nutrients on the package.  Your heart dies a little each day from the excess sodium. 
• It’s addictive. If you like lists (which clearly I do), tracking things, or are a little competitive, please do me a favor and don’t start counting calories. Staying under that daily goal becomes the new purpose of your life. Every time someone offers you food, all you think about is what it’s going to do to your count. In a few weeks of tracking I got to the point where the app I was using would give me alerts for eating too FEW calories in a day (oops).  

It’s all well and good to want to lose weight, and I think the best way to do so is an effective lifestyle change, but you should still be having a LIFE. Eat the delicious goodies occasionally. Have some wine. Enjoy your friend’s birthday without being *that* person asking to switch restaurants so you can get a certain salad with lean protein.

If you can do that while counting calories, as I said, more power to you! For me though, it’s a little too all-consuming. Really, this post is mainly a reminder to myself of why it would be a bad idea to bust out my app again and knock off those 10 pounds I want gone for the summer. General healthy eating and exercise when possible is the way to go!

Probably. I mean at the end of the day I’m not a nutritionist, just a gal that really likes to read fitness articles and post diet memes. 

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A. *pause* Boobs.

It’s hard to believe I’m writing my 100^th post for this blog. It’s been just over three years, and tons of random madness, but overall I think we’ve all had a good time.

Since this is the 100^th post, I had quite a struggle over deciding what to write about. I felt like it should be something epic and mind-blowing. Or, since this blog is really a means of forcing myself to write, an update on how my other writing is going (hint, not well). I petitioned my family for ideas. My brother wanted me to do a review of best/worst posts. My mother wanted me to talk about some spoilers from the latest Game of Thrones that she is having trouble accepting. My father suggested the evolutionary aspects of sleep (which I probably will do at some point because let’s be honest, I love talking about sleep).

In the end I decided to go with something very near to my heart.

Boobs.

(Yes, that was a pun. Laugh and move on)

Boobs are often the bane of my existence. Actually, I suppose not boobs, but the bras we need to keep ‘em in check.

Basically, bras are life ruiners.

You first have the struggle of trying to find a bra that fits. It is MUCH trickier than the male mind can even imagine. You have to take two things into consideration: band size and cup size.

Now a common misconception is that cup size is always the same. So if I wear a C, I would wear a C no matter what band size.

FALSE!!

The band size actually changes the cup size. So if you wear a 36 C and move up to a 38, you’re probably now wearing a B. This is called a “sister size.” Basically for every band size you move down you add a cup, and every band size you move up you subtract a cup. In theory, 34 D = 36 C = 38 B = 40 A.

Are you starting to sense the crazy here?

There are a ton of statistics flying around saying that most people are not actually wearing the correct bra size. That’s partially because of the band/cup logic we just discussed that not everyone is familiar with. It’s also partially because of how one determines their size.

If you go to a fancy bra store they will offer you a “fitting,” where using measuring tape and magic they will tell you your true bra size.

Now some people luck out, and have a great fitting and find their true bra right away. For years, I hated fittings with a PASSION because I would go with friends, get a fitting, and it was disastrous. They’d tell me a size that was so far off what I was wearing, all I could do was stare blankly at them. I’d try the bra they suggested. Not really because I believed them, but because I wanted to be a dick and show them they were wrong and stupid. This always led to trying on bras that produced quadriboob. Not a pleasant experience. Discouraged and pissed, I’d refuse to try anything else, because if the magic fitting doesn’t work for finding a size, what does? Random guessing? Luck?

I promise it’s not just me either. I recently read a buzzfeed article where a woman got six different fittings in a day, and while I laughed, I also almost cried from commiserating with her experience.

But recently, I figured out part of why this happens. I have cracked the logic of the bra fittings.

In theory, your bra size can be determined using measure tape. If you measure around your ribs this should determine your band size. So if you measure 34 inches around your ribs, you should wear a 34 band. The cup size is determined by then measuring across your breasts. You want to aim roughly for the nipple region for this measurement. Then, you subtract measurement 1 from measurement 2 to determine your cup. 1 inch of difference = A, 2 inches = B, 3 = C, and so on and so forth.

With such simple logic, how can anyone manage to screw up all the time??  

Two reasons.

First, the reason I often have problems specifically at Victoria’s Secret is because they make the assumption you’re wearing a PUSH UP BRA and thus DON’T FOLLOW THE FORMULA. Their push up bras are actually designed to measure as a cup size or two larger than you really are, so since they assume you’re wearing one, they subtract 2 inches from your second measurement before calculating your bra size. I know this, because the ONLY time I got a correct fitting at VS was when the lady specifically stopped and asked me if I was wearing a push up bra or not.

The second reason, and really the killer here, is that bras ARE NOT CONSISTENTLY SIZED. A 34 D in one line is NOT the same as a 34 D in another. Try taking sizes across stores and you will basically want to give up on wearing a bra forever. So even though you now know some of the secret logic behind bras, IT DOESN’T REALLY HELP MUCH.

Fucking bras.

If you somehow magically find ones that fit well, you then need to be prepared to shell out a decent amount of money to buy them. The bras I’m buying these days cost between $40-80, even on sale.

That’s not by choice. Let me stop to emphasize how much that is not a willing decision. Yes, I prefer pretty bras. I do not buy plain white bras, it’s true. But guess what. There are plenty of cheaper brands that still have pretty options. Guess what else. BITCHES DON’T EVEN MAKE MY SIZE!! I literally cannot buy bras at Target anymore. My size doesn’t exist. It’s not an option, even if I was willing to get something a bit dowdy, which is why I’ve had to resort to Victoria’s Secret.

Yay…. (not)

One would think that since bras are expensive, you should buy less of them, right?

ALSO FALSE.

I mean you could. I’m not going to stop you. But here’s more bra logic – the more you wear bras the more the band stretches and thus STOPS FITTING. You are never supposed to wear the same bra two days in a row because this causes it to stretch even faster. You are supposed to rotate bras, and the more you can add to the rotation the longer you can keep them keeping your girls nice and perky.

I mean seriously, is anyone else going crazy trying to follow all this “logic” that no one tells us and half the time doesn’t even apply? Was the entire bra industry designed to crush our dreams and drive us mad??

Pretty sure it was.

PS. If you didn’t recognize the title for this post, it comes from the excellent horror movie Stay Alive, because let’s be honest, bra shopping is it’s own kind of horror.