focusing on that caloric deficit..

today was a rough day, to say the least.
diet-wise, it was fine, but a lot of fuq'd up stuff happened today that i'm not going to talk about here.

the absolutely most straightforward way to see if you're on the right track is to look at the caloric deficit - that is, how many more calories did you burn than you consume? the opposite would be a caloric surplus, where you eat more calories than you burn and the extra energy is escorted to your hips. a deficit is where your body goes to places like your hips to get energy because you're not eating enough to meat energy demands.

it's oversimplified, but the principals hold true: figure out how many calories you burned, subtract the number of calories you've eaten, and you get your caloric deficit. divide that number by 3500 to find out how many lbs of weight you've lost. easy.

my caloric deficit over the last three days, according to fitday, was 12,833. That corresponds to 3.67 lbs of weight lost. The deficit today was 3806. yesterday 4555. wednesday 4472. those numbers are probably over-inflated in terms of calories burned.. where calorie intake is much more accurate. i'd guess that i burned enough calories to lose about 3 lbs of fat in 3 days.

here are the calorie numbers over the last three days:
wednesday: 839
thursday: 1115
friday: 1000

on wednesday, as posted here, i ran three miles and it went great. thursday (yesterday), i did about two miles of trail running. today i didn't exercise.

given that my daily goal is to eat less than 1000 calories a day, today i skipped my 450-calorie morning shake, had 150-calorie pea soup instead. it freed up a bunch of calories for later. that's not going to be a daily habit, but it was nice to have some asparagus (33 spears, which brought me exactly to 1000 calories for the day) after eating a piece of salmon tonight.

yesterday i had my shake, a 360 calorie lunch, and a piece of swordfish steak for dinner, which caused me to miss my goal by over 100 calories.

thoughts on today - looking at the fitday log for the day, i noticed that my diet today was 44% fat, 24% carbs, 32% protein. since I'm eating so few calories, i'd really like to see the carbs number a lot higher and fat lower. this is a result of not having my carb-rich shake this morning and replacing it with low-calories pre-prepared meals that happened to be high in fat. the salmon i had for dinner was high in fat too, but not enough to account for 44% of my total calories for the day. so that's another thing i'll be looking at labels for when picking out food.

yesterday, i was a high on protein and low on carbs.. but also lower in fat - 36% fat, 44% protein, and 20% carbs.

I'm thinking about trying for a 50/25/25 carbs to fat to protein ratio, and seeing what that does for my energy level.

-steve