Food glorious food!

A Christmas present from my little sister was a book called Food for Fitness by Anita Bean. This is a book that takes food and fitness and mixes them up with some science and a smattering of maths which I think is a brilliant combination. It tells you what you should be eating before after and during training how much you should be eating and what is good and bad.

The trouble with the book is that it requires some working out what quantities you (or in this case, I) should be eating and this takes a little bit of time. I have however finally sat down with pen, paper and calculator and tried to make sense of what she is telling me.

Eating well is about eating the correct amount, in the right proportions of the different food groups, and the first step is to work out your calorific needs.

Start by working out your BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) this is how many calories your body needs to sustain itself. Working out my BMR, I expend something like 1690 calories while I am doing absolutely nothing, just sitting around chilling my boots.

Then you need to identify your PAL (Physical Activity Level). This is just a way of putting a number onto your levels of physical exertion. I plumped for “Moderate activity” Which I think is fair.

By doing some maths to your PAL and BMR you work out your calorific needs for a single day. I need something like 2366 calories per day to keep up with my pace of life.

These calories come from different sources as the body needs different compounds for its upkeep. With some percentage based maths I worked out I need 345 grams of carbohydrate (1380 calories). 90 grams of protein (360 calories) and around about 60 grams of good fat (monounsaturated, polyunsaturated and Omega-3) (590 calories).

The rest of the calories are discretionary which I can have in the form of rich sugars and alcohol. As my discretionary calories amount to about 35 calories a day even if I stop taking sugar in my tea I’m not going to get very drunk.

Actually, while talking about alcohol, in moderation is a good thing and can raise HDL cholesterol (the good stuff), red wine even has stuff in it which lowers bad cholesterol.

Anyway. I made a note of everything I ate and drank yesterday, it is a pretty typical weekday fare.

Drink.
1 cup of coffee. 1 sugar. Semi skimmed milk.
5 cups of tea. 1 sugar. Semi skimmed milk.
2 glasses of water.
2 glasses of white wine. Chardonnay. (Jacobs Creek).

Food.
6 ham and cheese and tomato sandwiches.
1 packet of Doritos Tangy Cheese crisps.
Parma ham wrapped chicken breast with cream cheese and pesto with fresh Tortellini with spinach and Ricotta.

Before I started this I was convinced that I had a good healthy balanced diet (with maybe the exception of the packet of crisps and the glasses of wine. Both of which were exceptions to my general weekday consumption) but on paper it doesn’t look like I am eating to my best.

Mondays totals worked out at 2,566 calories. That’s 200 calories over my daily limit. This equates to a weight gain of about 0.2kgs per week which does fit nicely with my observed weight gain. This isn’t so much a bad thing, as I am happy to put on a bit of weight however I still have a couple of reserves of fat sitting on my obliques (my love handles) which I want to deplete first so I might try to eliminate 200 calories from my diet for a couple of months.

Added up I consumed about 165 grams of carbohydrates. That is 180 grams less than recommended. This is not so good actually as carbohydrates are the first source of energy that the muscles turn to and I seem to be well short of what I should be eating.

Protein 139 grams. I should have about 90 grams of protein in my diet, so I am eating 49 grams more than recommended.

Added up I had 91.2 grams of fat in my days eating, which is 31.6 grams more than is recommended. I didn’t look deep enough into my diet to see if the fats are the good fats or bad fats but where possible I try to use olive oil in my cooking and I try to avoid sources of saturated and trans fats.

I didn’t really go into the minutia of the foods composition, which carbohydrates are high in GI, what vitamins and minerals are in each item, how much salt is in each dish, etc. But that will be my next task over the coming weeks. I’m not too worried about those things yet as I haven’t got the proportions of carbohydrates, fats and Proteins balanced yet.

I am going to go away and devise a brand spanking new diet based on my recommended numbers and will post it here in the near future.