Food Diary

Here is a screen shot of what I plan to eat tomorrow (race day) taken from myfitnesspal.com:

I love this website because you can enter your weight and other information and it will tell you how much you would weigh at a certain point in the future based on your diet each day. It's motivating! There are a few things that I don't like about it, so I ignore them. Primarily, the number of grams of protein it suggests and the number of grams of carbs. As you can see, it thinks I will be consuming way to many grams of protein. Personally, I think it's a little low given that it's a race day. Also, it thinks I'm consuming too few carbs. That might actually be true for a race day, but I only want to consume carbs before the race and the race is early.

You might also notice that it recommends 1,802 calories as my goal. I think that's pretty good for a race day. In general it recommends 1500 and adds additional calories based on exercise. For this entry I input an estimated time and pace for the race tomorrow. For optimum weight loss and strength training, I think a roughly 500 calorie per day deficit is a good thing. 1 pound corresponds to roughly 1000 calories, so a 500 calorie per day deficit amounts to roughly 2.5 pounds of weight loss per week. In reality, a high protein and the corresponding muscle gain will offset some of that weight loss, which is fine.

In general, if you account for eating more than this in reality (humans are weak), the fact that running a 4k results in burning more than 272 calories, muscle gain, and the inherent error in all of these measurements I would conservatively predict 10 pounds in 1.5 to 2 months. Keep in mind that this would amount to a higher degree of fat loss as muscle is much more dense than fat.

I would also like to make clear that one should only limit themselves to this few calories while they are both training and trying to lose weight. Once an optimum weight is reached, caloric intake should go up by a pretty decent amount (depending on the continuation of physical activity).

I would recommend keeping a food diary on myfitnesspal and posting the entry each day. I plan to do that starting day! :)