Calories In. Calories Out. Blah, blah blah

Calories In Calories out, blah blah blah

It sounds like a simple enough equation doesn’t it, but to anyone who struggles with weight, the process of burning off a pound of blubber is way more complicated and hard.  I am becoming convinced that much of this is because we have absolutely no idea what the caloric content of food is and we have over inflated ideas about how many calories our lardy little butts are actually burning.  Walk for 15 minutes on a hot day and surely you’ve burnt off 500 calories, right?  More like a 150 and that’s if you’re fleet like Mercury moving at a 15 mile an hour pace.  Dog walking clearly doesn’t count for much which suggests that sofa sitting, even if you fluff the pillow once every now and again, really isn’t the aerobic calorie burning machine that most of us hope it is.  CURSES!

This is weekend is a case in point.  I’ve thrown away my home scales in an act of rebellion.  The number never changes much (except upwards) and hopping on it every time I go to the bathroom, hoping that pee actually got rid of the forty pounds of “water weight” I’m carrying, became a cause of self flagellation and loathing that seemed counter productive.  Now, I weigh on Fridays when I go to the Y.  I picked Friday’s so that I can see how my Herculean levels of self discipline during the week have returned impressive results.  So this past Friday, after a sin free week, I confidently strode onto the scales without even taking off my tennis shoes, ear rings, rings, clothes, or running my hands through my hair to shake off any hefty stragglers which is what I normally do in an attempt to be as “light” as possible.  The scales rewarded me with a pathetic  ½ pound over the previous week.  That means that over the course of the entire 7 days I managed to burn a measly 250 calories a day more than I consumed.  This sucks.  Really it does.  I work out EVERY DAY.  Weights and walking (the fast kind) MWF and I run on Tues and Thurs.  Plus with the move I’m working my tuckus off lifting, hauling and unpacking and all that effort only equals 250 calories a day?  No wonder I’m still a Weeble.  In my mind, all this effort, all this careful eating, no wine (sniffle, sniffle) working out, being mindful crap should at least count for 5 pounds.  3 at a minimum.  Not even one?  That’s just plain mean.

Unfortunately, the adipose fairy is much kinder on the add not subtract side of the equation.  I took my measly half pound and then when I got home Friday, I mowed the grass in 100+ degree temps, which took an hour and 15 minutes, was ridiculously hard because the self propelling action is not working on the mower so now all forward momentum is provided by yours truly, then I cleaned and scoured my bathrooms.  Saturday morning I went for a three mile fun.  I am a machine, I tell you, a Machine!!  Surely I earned the bottle (small one) of wine I drank over the course of the whole weekend?  Surely, the little teeny, hardly worth heating the oven up for, Totinos cheese pizza I ate (okay one on Saturday AND one on Sunday but they are SO SMALL!) can’t be counted against me in the face of such enormous physical activity?  How can it possibly be fair that I can’t sit on the sofa and watch the Olympics and through osmosis lose weight and become one of the hard bodies (okay I’d be happy with firmer fat)?  If you do in fact become what you think and I’ve been thinking “rail thin” for years, how is it right that it hasn’t made the least bit of difference?  I ask myself this question all the time, but over the sound of crunching potato chips, I can never seem to hear the answer.

This morning, at the Y, I decided just for self satisfaction, to step on the scales and see just how much good all that activity did me and lo and behold, my half pound that I scoffed at?  She’s back. In toto.  Which means that in 2 days I ate 1750 calories more than I burned.  And that my friends, tells you and me and everyone else, what the hell is actually going on in my fat fueled furnace of a life.