Element Two - Nutrition/Calorie Counting

Here are a few sayings for you:

Change in weight = food intake minus exercise
We are what we eat....

There is a lot of truth to both of these statements. However when I started working towards my goal I didn't have a clue how to go about keeping track of either the number of calories I was eating or how to determine what foods were good to eat.

Research was definately in order!

I started with a software package called DietPower . This software has a list of 11,000 foods and more importantly has the ability to let you enter your own foods using the infomation on the nutrition label if you need to. Once you enter or select a food you can tell the software how much you ate and instantly see the number of calories in the food. By right clicking on the food you see a pie chart that shows you what percentage of the food is fat, carbs and protein. Very useful when trying to decide what foods you want to eat again!

Now in order to be able to tell the food sizing I went out to Walmart and picked up a simple food scale for a minimal amount of money.

Another feature in the software is that you can type in how much you exercised in the exercise log.

The combination of these two main features gives you the ability to control how much you eat and be able to see at a glance how much you are eating compared to how much you are exercising.

As time passed I became more interested in good nutrition so I read a bunch of books. I found while reading the books that I looked for common themes amongst a bunch of books.

Lifestyle change not quick fix

I kept the fun rule in mind too. I am trying to make a lifestyle change here not make a quick fix. In that case if I felt like a cookie I tried to substitute a fruit. If that wasn't appealing then I would limit myself to one cookie.

There were days when I felt the need to indulge in a piece of cheesecake or something similar. Oh well as time passes the need for that is less appealing and I miss it less.

By keeping an eye on the big picture I found I could be less rigid in terms of the odd "bad" thing and yet still enjoy the whole eating process.

So how does this apply to touring on a bicycle?

As time passed and I learned about nutrition I started making food choices that helped me to reduce my weight as well as improve my performance on the bike.

Another thing I did was eliminate exercise bars and special exercise drinks on any rides shorter then 90 minutes. Instead I relied on water and my fat stockpile. I never bonked as a result so for me this strategy worked.

On to Element Three.....

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