The food diary takes a holiday

If you take a look at the graph below, you'll see that a couple of Saturdays ago, day 103, I'd put some weight on. Not only that, I'd put weight on for two weeks on the trot. Not what I'd intended.

Yes, there had been some work dinners - as well as the usual weekend binges - but I wasn't happy with it. It was time for a bit of a change.

So, for the last two weeks, you'll notice there has been no food diary: I have stopped keeping one. I've done this for a few reasons, despite the fact that there is a lot of evidence to suggest that keeping a food diary is one of the easiest things to do to help you lose weight.

Why keep a food diary

Simply, just to keep an eye on how many calories you've swallowed each day. If you put in fewer than you use, you'll lose weight, so knowing how many you've put in is a key part of the weight-loss equation.

If you keep a food diary for a while, you do start to get a feel for how many calories are contained within certain foods - particularly if you keep eating the same things again and again as I do. I'm certainly a creature of habit.

Once you've got the caloric values of a core of ingredients stored in your head, it's relatively straightforward to cook yourself a quick meal, and know about how many calories are in there. It's even easier if you use the rounding up to the nearest fifty method.

A quick example:

Slice of buttered toast: 150 kcal
A large egg: 100 kcal
Two back bacon medallions: 100 kcal
Two slices of ham: 50 kcal
Large glass of wine: 250 kcal
Slice of black pudding/lorne sausage/fruit pudding/haggis: 200 kcal
Milk in 2 cups of tea: 50 kcal
1x Sainsbury's jam doughnut: 250 kcal
1x buttered Scottish morning roll: 150 kcal

With that simple list, you're empowered to create myriad combinations of breakfasts, brunches, snacks, lunches, light dinners, very heavy dinners, and more, quickly, easily and without having to worry about doing lots of sums each time.

It just makes things very easy and, by always having a running total of what you're eating, you know when you're getting close to your daily calorie limit and, if you go over it, by how much you need to adjust the number for tomorrow to keep the week on track.

So why am I not keeping a food diary?

Firstly, because I'm sure it makes a lot of this blog very boring. Let's be honest, you know what I eat by now - mostly doughnuts - and I think, well, I hope at least, that I've made the point that you can lose weight week on week by eating mostly doughnuts, even if you have a Big Mac or a can of Dr. Pepper.

Just keep the calorie total under what you burn.

Secondly, it's also very boring to write. I have to keep a note on my phone, then type it up each day, all while trying to get the children dressed, fed, cleaned, teeth brushed and cleaned again. Keeping this food diary - keeping it public at least - was just an annoying part of my morning routine.

The other reason - and perhaps the main reason - was that I think I just needed to shake things up a bit. I'd put on weight for a couple of weeks, yes there were reasons, but perhaps the food diary was giving me a false sense of security. The running total said I was under my limit, so I ate something else to take me up to my limit.

That strategy is fine, but it doesn't leave you with sufficient headroom when you do end up having a couple of work meals out in the same week.

So, for the last two weeks the food diary has gone. And I've lost weight for both of those weeks. I'm nearly back down to where I was before I went to France.

I'm still counting calories, but I'm just having a quick think about it in the morning, roughly planning the day and not thinking about it after that. For the majority of work days, the plan has been 1 bag of 5 doughnuts (1150 kcal) or cookies (1100 kcal) for late morning, then some ham sandwiches (150 kcal each) to take me up to around 2000 calories for the day. Perhaps 2250 if I'm going to be walking a lot.

Quick, easy and, so far it seems, effective.

Back to life, back to reality

If you look at the last few points on the graph, you'll see a story. This is the story of my work and social life.

As I have little in the way of social life, it's basically my work life, which over the past couple of weeks, has involved way above my average number of nights out during the working week.

If you've seen any representative weeks of my food diary, you'll perhaps know that I'm big on the weekend binging. My Saturday and Sunday food and drink binges are my release; a 500 calorie a day (or more) celebration of all that is tasty and indulgent, washed down with some of the (relatively cheap, but still good) finest New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs that Tesco can offer for under £6.50 a bottle. Generally Wairau Cove.

Although, that said, I've been enjoying Lidl's £5.49 Gavi recently...

So, with the weekend being based around enjoying the sweet rewards of as many calories as I can afford, the working week is where I do my dieting and lose my weight, ready to start the next weekend a pound or two lighter than the last one and do it all over again.

Of course, if you then end up eating and drinking out on those weekdays as well, it's game over.

All work and no play...

And so, I have to report - you can see it on the graph - two consecutive Saturdays of putting on weight. And a good few pounds at that.

The most recent Saturday wasn't helped by the fact that I had a gig with the band on the Friday night. I'd been pretty good with the diet on the Friday, and had enough calories left for four pints to come in under 2500.

In the end, I had five. And a kebab on the way back to the night bus.

Then a couple of glasses of wine and four slices of cheese on toast when I got home.

And a couple of Jaffa Cake bars.

It was perhaps not surprising that I was a bit heavier than I had been the previous Saturday. Of course, as I got home at about 1.30 am, a lot of that food was still inside me by the time I stepped on the scales, so the 11 stone 11 pounds figure was perhaps not representative.

After the usual weekend binge though, Monday's weigh in of 11 stone 12 pounds possible was.

I'm trying (when I remember) to record a mid-week weight these days as well; Tuesday or Wednesday. Today's figure: 11 stone 10 pounds. I will take that. There was a meeting after work yesterday, but I left before the pizza made it out of the box.

I feel this week needs to be a good week. It would be nice to weigh in on Saturday at 11 st 9 lbs or a bit lower. I was 11,10 this morning, so I'm on track, but I am out - for dinner - after work on Thursday, so focus needs to be maintained.

As long as I don't do anything stupid this week, I should be fine. I'm back on the bag of doughnuts or cookies for lunch, and everything seems to be working.

Bring on Saturday morning...

The honeymoon is over

I think I may have become complacent.

Following this diet, I have lost nearly a stone. Then I enjoyed what some French restaurants and a Premier Inn buffet breakfast had to offer and put lots of that back on again. Then I lost most of that. Now I've put a bit more on.

Being realistic, my weight is always going to fluctuate. Eating (and drinking) is my coping mechanism. It is my indulgence. It is my release. The idea of my weight (or anyone's really) getting to one particular value and remaining there indefinitely - ruler flat - is unlikely.

In Updike's fantastic book Roger's Version, Roger's wife Esther has a weight maintenance strategy: she weighs herself each morning and if she's over 100 pounds, "she eats nothing but celery and carrots until she's back to exactly one oh oh".

That is not me.

Part of me would like to say - in my defence - that there have been diet blog experimental factors at play over the last couple of weeks (which have proven both fruitful and interesting, stay tuned for a future post), but, really, I'm just making excuses.

The truth is, over the last couple of weeks, I've not really been on it.

With this incredibly simple diet, losing weight has been so thoroughly easy. I've not really had to change what I eat; I've not had to join anything; I've not had to sign up to anything; I've not replaced what I eat with expensive pre-packaged 'nutritionally-balanced, macro-synergised' meals. I've just used my brain, added things up, and lost the pounds.

If you saw my post about my pedometer, you might have seen that I suggested some pros and some potential cons about counting your steps when trying to lose weight. It would appear I have fallen foul to some of those cons Again, useful experimental data (stay tuned yet again...), but, the fact of the matter is - for the first time since I wasn't on a pre-determined 'diet holiday', I weighed more this Saturday morning than I did last Saturday morning.

Yes, I still weigh a good few pounds less than when I started, but that wasn't in the grand plan. Today was supposed to herald the dawn of a new era - or at least a week in which I lose weight - but I've blown that as well.

The issue is really a matter of there only being 7 days in a week. As I've grown accustomed to my weekend blowout, I have a weekend blowout. The problem last week - and it's a problem again this week - is that I then have more than one weekday with major nights out, with dinners and the concomitant several beers.

In previous weeks, I've had the two day weekend blowout, but that's more than compensated for my the next five good diet days. Last week and this week, there's been a weekend blowout, plus two additional weekday blowouts. This leaves me with a week comprised of four blowout days, with only three diet days left to not just make up for those, but to then do the job of the week-on-week weight loss.

With the best will in the world, that's not really likely to happen.

So, to the future. Let's just see how it goes. These two weeks are not representative of my lifestyle. If I accept that I'll put weight on, I can do that with the knowledge that, when my normal schedule comes back around, I'll lose it again.

And - and I know I've said this before, often - that's what the diet is for. It's not a competition to try and lose weight and never put any on again ever. My diet lets me put weight on, and to be sufficiently ahead of the curve that I can put on a couple of pounds one week, look in the mirror, and still see a set of abdominal muscles. That's what it's for.

Counting steps for weight loss

A few weeks ago, my wife got me a pedometer. A little Jawbone Up Move.

It's a pretty simple little thing, though I'm sure it can do more than I use it for, but it's raison d'etre is counting steps, so that's how I use it.

The thing is though, does that actually help with my diet?

Does counting steps help you lose weight?

That one is difficult to answer. I certainly think it has helped me, but it may not help you. It also has the potential to be a dangerously sharp double-edged sword...

Let's start by revisiting the thermodynamic diet fundamentals: the change in your weight is driven by the utilisable energy that you take in (I say utilisable as if you consumed 1 gallon of petrol, you wouldn't really get the use of those  31,500 calories, you'd probably just die), the energy you use to do work, and the energy that ends up as heat.

It follows, then, that the more work you do, the more energy gets used to do that (and more going as heat) and the more weight you'll lose (assuming you don't compensate by increasing what you eat).

So how does the pedometer fit in? Well, a quick search of the literature shows a good few studies that show that pedometer use can help with weight loss. Of course, a pedometer is just a tool, so it can't help you lose weight any more than a trowel or a treadmill; the important thing is how you use it...

How can a pedometer help you lose weight?

For me, it's mostly because I'm quite competitive with myself. I don't like failing at things. Even if those things are as completely arbitrary as walking 10,000 steps a day, if I have a way of tracking how many I've done, I'll want to do it.

And then do more.

A couple of weeks ago, it got to nearly bedtime and I was still comfortably shy of the 10,000. So I ran on the spot until I got there. It took about 15m, and I could feel the heart rate rising. All of that exercise - limited though it was - was something I wouldn't have done if I didn't have a pedometer.

The other benefit is that it provides a more tangible way of compensating for the occasional indulgence. Each step is supposed to use up about 0.05 calories. That makes 10,000 steps 500 calories, and 2000 calories is about 100 calories.

So, if you're usually going for 10,000 calories a day and you fancy a Cadbury's Crunchie, turn that 10,000 into 14,000 and you've paid for it.

Why a pedometer might not help you lose weight

Well, let's come back to that whole 10,000 steps being about 500 calories thing again. On the surface, that's all good, but how you account for it in your daily calorie target. Let's say you're an average man with a daily target of 2500 calories. You get a pedometer and walk 10,000 steps and think "great, that's 500 calories, I can have an extra 2 pints of bitter".

Well, you probably can't, as that 2500 calorie figure probably includes a good few thousand steps as part of your average daily activity already. If you then claim more calories for those 10,000 steps, you might be claiming them twice.

For me though, the biggest problem is all the extra steps above the 10,000. I'm finding that I'm now considering those as extra calories I can eat.

Before I had the pedometer, I considered my calorie allowance to perhaps be a bit higher, but I wouldn't even consider any exercise as allowing me to eat more. If I did more exercise, that was just a bonus that led to even more weight loss. Now though, I'm finding myself saying "well, I can have that pudding and I'll just walk an extra x steps"; some of which I may well have walked anyway.

It's a bit of a balancing act, but some of the data is interesting - more on that in a week or two - and it's quite nice to know that, in the 6 weeks or so I've had it, I've walked over half a million steps.

Quite a humbling figure...

Day 90 - 5250 calories

Breakfast
Milk (50)
Shortbread (650)
Almond croissant (350)

Lunch
Hake with vegetables (500)
Cheeseboard (1000)
Wine (450)
Afternoon tea cakes (500)

Dinner
Beer (300)
Wine (300)
Chicken and vegetable stir fry (300)
2x slices toast (200)
2x slices toast and jam (400)
Jaffa cake bar (100)
Glass of port (150)

Exercise
45m walking

Day 91 - 2800 calories

Breakfast
Leftover Weetabix (50)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken curry (300)

Dinner
Venison burger and garlic mushrooms (250)
Beer (200)
Toast (100)
4x slices bread and jam (800)

Exercise
2x 1.5m planks
80m walking

Day 92 - 1950 calories

Breakfast
Ham (100)
5x double chocolate cookies (1100)

Lunch
Chicken curry (500)

Dinner
Bacon sandwich (250)

Exercise
2x 1.5m plank
2x 30 press ups
90m walking

Day 93 - 2600 calories

Breakfast
Ham sandwich (200)

Lunch
5x jam doughnuts (1150)

Dinner
Chicken curry (500)
3x pints beer (750)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 94 - 3450 calories

Breakfast and lunch
5x ham sandwich (600)

Dinner
3x pints beer (750)
Wine (400)
Steak and chips (1000)
Brownie (700)

Exercise
75m walking

Day 95 - 3100 calories

Breakfast
Cake (300)
Milk (100)

Lunch
Burger, bun, bacon, mushrooms and salad (700)

Dinner
Tuna and veggies (400)
Wine (800)
Cake (300)
Shreddies (500)

Exercise
60m walking