Skip to main content

The 8,000 Calorie Mancation Weekend


The Perfect Storm: Wings, Beer, Ribs, Bacon, Baked Beans, Donuts, Chips, Dips. If there was a more efficient way to consume that many calories in one weekend, I don't know what it'd be. If I ate any vegetables all weekend, they could have fit on a tea saucer. I barely cracked 10,000 steps the first day, 8,000 the next. Fortunately, these weekends are extremely rare, or I'd probably weigh 400 pounds.

Of course, I'm just estimating on the calorie count. It could be a little more or less, but it would have been about impossible to calculate. Some of the guys were joking about how it's like taking the max stroke penalty on a hole in golf. "Let's just be gentlemen and assign you a somewhat respectable approximation of how much you stuffed your face and move onto the next hole."

The Cheapo Rules require that I step on the scale every morning, and so step on the scale I did. I had crept up a little heading into the weekend, almost as if my body was preparing me for what was coming. I weighed a flat 158 going in and came out at...166 - an incredible 8 pound gain. 8 pounds is 28,000 calories, so I knew it was mostly water weight. Still, it's unnerving to see that kind of staggering gain.

I stepped on the scale this morning and was down to 161.4. I figure I'll know in the next day or two the extent of my flabby gains as I flush out the rest of the Great Salt Lake's worth of sodium I must have consumed over a 48 hour period.

The upside of hosting this extravaganza is that I have a lot of leftover food to get me through the week. The downside is that most of it is the same food that sent my scale numbers into orbit. But, anything can be healthy if you stretch out the portions enough.

Today's lunch is 4 chicken wings, some cheesy, bacon-y potatoes on a bed of assorted veggies - asparagus, onions and mushrooms cooked on the Foreman Grill, which I have to say is becoming one of my favorite cooking tools. The onions I kind of burned this morning because I was trying to get ready while cooking, but if you turn them occasionally while cooking, this thing caramelizes them a lot better than I ever can seem to do in a frying pan.

 
This week is going to require some nutritional ballparking as I eat my way out of the party leftovers, but that's ok since I'm planning to be comfortably under my 2000 calorie targets.


I wouldn't really recommend doing these kinds of weekends as you first start out since the scale numbers can be really demoralizing - 8 pounds is a significant portion of any weight loss goal. I knew what was coming and how my body usually responds to these kinds of events, so I didn't sweat it.

Also, I'm not a pro boxer or a jockey, so I don't have any real weight deadlines. I'd like to still keep my 40 pound badge going into my 40th birthday in April, but as long as I'm hovering around that number, I'll be happy. The Cheapo Plan is like the never ending marathon: you'll never lose to anyone - you'll just miss opportunities that are easily regained. I expect my weight will normalize to around 160 by the end of the week, and the fun I had last weekend made it well worth it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chopping Down Costs & Fat

I've spent a lot of time talking about how gym memberships are a complete waste of time and money. For most people, they make about as much sense as skipping all your errands to spend the day taking joyrides up and down a toll road. The fact is, we all have chores that need to get done around the house which all represent opportunities for exercise and cost savings by not paying someone else to do them for you. They may not be as physically demanding as splitting wood, but they all involve doing things that need to get done anyway and, more importantly, occupying your time by doing something other than eating, the leading cause of fatness. Now, I'm not proposing that you start tilling your garden with a fork just to keep yourself out of the kitchen. There's always a delicate balance between efficiency, exercise, cost savings and enjoyment of the task at hand when deciding where to spend extra money for efficiency's sake. For example, I know that I could get my...
Post a Comment
Read more

Low Tech, The New High Tech

It's funny how we've grown so accustomed to having modern conveniences do things for us that doing things the old way becomes an unheard of, revolutionary act. We get so wrapped up in the ways the health industry has told us how to live healthfully - usually involving big cash outlays for gym memberships, expensive in-home exercise equipment or premium health foods that we develop a tunnel vision to their self-serving fitness paradigm and cannot understand why it barely works or not at all. We keep blasting away at the square peg in the round hole because brute force is how you achieve your goals. "Hey, no pain, no gain, man" - or so they tell us. And, I say this as someone who currently owns 3 workout machines and who once bought an ab-roller. Now, don't get me wrong: like any activity, workout machines and gym memberships can be great supplements to the Cheapo lifestyle if you apply all the other blocking and tackling principles of nutrition management that th...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances. My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here. It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily...
Post a Comment
Read more