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. 

A Reader's Rant

There are many things in life that irritate me – airport delays, people that tell me what to do, people that tell me what not to do, people that wear peach lotion – just to name a few. If you’re noticing the pattern (typically it involves people and their actions), yeah I’ve noticed that too. I have very low tolerance for stupid mistakes that could easily be corrected. This is why I go absolutely BONKERS over the fact that almost all written articles these days contain typos.

Seriously, it’s getting to be ridiculous. Especially considering that technology will now even catch some of our errors, and the rest could be caught with a quick edit.

I'm allowed to laugh, I'm an English Major

For the most part it’s not even grammatical errors, or if it is, it’s one that looks like it was just overlooked, not that the author lacks a basic understanding of grammar. Despite assumptions from friends, I’m really not that much of a grammar nazi. Some grammar and writing conventions are outdated or restrict the sentence flow. Especially the rule about ending with a preposition.

I had a teacher in high school that actually started trying to follow this rule, and would reword his sentences to make sure they didn’t end with a preposition. We thought it was funny, because half the time the sentence ends up weird.

Personally, I prefer writing to flow the same way a person talks. I still think there are different levels of writing, just like there are different levels of talking. I don’t use the exact same phrases with friends as I do with clients. But I don’t completely change my style of talking either.

If it sounds like I’m being hypocritical, complaining about writing errors and then excusing ungrammatical writing, I understand. Actually I have a few areas where I totally admit my hypocrisy, but this is not one of them. You see, what annoys me with writing errors are the stupid mistakes that could have been fixed if somebody had just checked for them. It’s not even the writing I’m mad at, it’s the laziness of not having someone proofread.

I’m talking about obvious errors here. I’m not even too hung up on things like “to” instead of “too.” Those sort of things are actually easy to overlook if you’re rushing (although why someone is rushing through instead of taking the time to properly look over their work is a good question).

When you write, you get in a certain mind frame. It’s quite simple to misread your writing so that you don’t catch errors. In fanfiction, most writers have what they call a “beta.” It’s basically an editor. Somebody to read through your work and check for those types of errors before you post.

Now sometimes a writer will post a new story, or a new chapter, without their beta checking through it. Some writers never use a beta (which actually includes me, I’ve never had a beta for my fanfiction). Typically they will include an acknowledgement or apology for any errors that do come up.

But that’s fanfiction, it’s not published, it’s just people screwing around for fun.

I’m more concerned with accredited media. I check Yahoo and MSN articles fairly often. It is becoming ridiculous how often I find simple errors in the articles. Seriously isn’t somebody getting paid for this writing? How can they push out news stories without doing a simple check of the article??

Again, I’m not even talking about little things like whether or not the Oxford comma is being used (although while we’re on the subject – if you do not support usage of the Oxford comma we should no longer be friends. Just saying). This is an example from earlier this week on yahoo. 

Somehow a random stream of words ended up in the middle of an article. Twice. Was this supposed to be a link? HOW DID THEY MISS THIS!?

Granted, with an online article I suppose they figure they can always edit it later. You have no idea how furious I get when this happens in printed materials.

Last month I borrowed a book from my friend Kevin called Armor. It was pretty fabulous. I think of it as a nice mix of Starship Troopers, the book, and Starship Troopers, the movie. But the typos. OMG. Every time I talked to Kevin about it (he actually hasn’t read it yet) that’s all I could talk about. There was a bajillion of them! All over the place! Like huge, glaringly obvious errors. More than once it actually duplicated an entire section of text further down the page, in the middle of a different paragraph. You can just guess how disconcerting that made the reading experience.

I’m currently in the middle of an excellent zombie book. It may be my new favorite zombie book ever (although actually I don’t have a current favorite zombie book, as I get halfway through reading them and then freak the heck out of myself and have to stop). It’s brilliant, as it explores the world 20 years after the zombie outbreak, and how it’s changed the way the news is reported and accessed. It’s called Feed by the way if you want to check it out. But even in this book I have caught more than once random question marks appearing in the middle of a sentence.

So if my sentence is supposed to be “people are sucking hardcore and not catching these stupid mistakes” it instead becomes “people are sucking hardcore and not? Catching these stupid mistakes.” These are not questions, just sentences, and the question mark doesn’t even appear in a logical place.

Now with fanfiction, an author can choose whether or not to use a beta. With published material, I always assumed that before investing good money in publishing a story, someone at some point would invest in a proofreader. Am I wrong? Are we sacrificing edits in order to deliver results faster?

I give you free reign to laugh at me now when my posts have little typos. It’s happened before, and I try to fix them whenever I can. I do check through my own writing at least once before putting it up, but I can’t catch everything. It would behoove me to have someone else check through as well, but this is just a blog for me to play around. I promise if at any point in life I’m going to have something published for real, it will be read over so many times that at least the informal proofreaders (me, plus friends and family I guilt trip) will have sections memorized.

After all, my momma raised me that if you’re going to do something, you don’t do it quick, you do it right.

 

Goals and Rules

Welcome to 2013! I’m feeling pretty good about this year so far. For one thing I’m up and moving, which typically isn’t the case on New Year’s Day.  For another I have chicken soup on the stove and it smells delicious.

Anyway, this is the time of year when we reflect on the past and plan for the future. Now last year instead of making resolutions I just made some general goals for the year. This year, I’m taking that one step further. I’m going to have my goals, and also have some rules. Kind of the dos and don’ts for 2013. Most of my goals are actually going to be some variations on last year’s, so let’s start with a recap!

Goal 1 LY (last year): Write one page a week.

The nice thing about the way I interpreted this goal was that averaging was acceptable. Thus if I wrote 4 pages one day I could really count it for the whole month. I stuck to it pretty well too until last month. However, I think I need to amp it up this year.

Goal 1 TY (this year, duh, keep up with me here): Write two blog posts a month, finish second part of fanfiction story, and write ONE ORIGINAL STORY BY THE END OF THE YEAR.

That last part is the most important. The whole idea of writing whatever last year was to ease back into writing fiction. I’m not going to put any restrictions on how long this original story will be, but by god I will write something, even if it’s short.

Goal 2 LY:  Work out eight times a month.

Totally nailed this one! I really counted it more as jazzercising at least eight times a month, which I still managed to do. So to make it more challenging…

Goal 2 TY: Work out ten times a month and make Club Jazzercise by November 1st.

Club Jazzercise is for when you get 150 jazzercise classes in a year. I am very much on the verge for last year. I’ll find out tomorrow if I made it or I was one off. I am freaking determined to make it this year. You get a shirt and everything. Plus the mad street cred. Now if you know any sort of math you’ll realize that going to jazzercise only 10 times a month won’t get me to Club Jazzercise. This is taking into consideration the busy months when I don’t have as much time between traveling to make it to class. I plan to go far more often than that.

Goal 3 LY: Cook more new recipes.

This was rather a crappy goal as I didn’t really define it well. What’s “more?” One? Two? I did decent at it the beginning of the year. I also started baking bread which was new for me.

Goal 3 TY: Cook home more often instead of eating out all the time or making frozen food.

I was doing SO good cooking for myself at first last year and then got lazy. Now again, this is very open to interpretation but that’s because with my crazy schedule I don’t want to say something like “cook three times a week” and then stress because I’m not home to do so. Goals should be something to work towards, not something to freak over. This also ties in nicely with my brand new goal:

Goal 4: Eat healthier.

This goal is not yet fleshed out as I need to do some research. I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I don’t believe in calories. I still don’t, and calories have nothing to do with this goal so I can’t just look for low cal options.

My family has joked for years that I’m going to die at 30, and that age is inching ever closer. I want to LIVE.  Apparently everything I eat is bad for your cholesterol & heart. My family also doesn’t have the best record with healthy hearts. I don’t want to completely change my diet, but I figure a few small tweaks might keep me alive a bit longer.

So those are the goals for the year. Now for the rules. I’ve actually had great success with rules before. I like having order in my life. I’m also stubborn about sticking to things, so rules work excellently for me. A lot of times I’ll also set up consequences for when I don’t follow the rules. I’m not quite that motivated this year.

Rule 1: Only three unnecessary purchases for myself are allowed per month.

Clearly groceries and house stuff are considered necessary. I never include books in any kind of budgeting rules, and I consider them necessary for my sanity anyway. This is more things like clothes, movies (buying to own, going to the movies is an activity and doesn’t count), and random mini objects.

Rule 2: DO NOT book bad hotels.

I already know I’m going to struggle with this one, but it’s necessary. Since when I travel the client has to cover the charges, I am in the habit of staying at cheaper hotels. Generally this works well. After multiple bad experiences though I am determined to step it up a notch and stay more consistently at hotels with better reviews even if they cost like $30 more a night.

So those are the plans for the year! Here’s hoping for a great year for everyone with lots of fun, happiness, and free t-shirts.