A month of calorie counting

I’ve been recording absolutely eeevverything since 1th Feb. I initially started out intending to go hardcore ketovore after a couple months of laxness over Xmas (and whilst staying with a vego family), but in the end family stuff and travel and social obligations came up so instead I just decided to eat as I please and passively recorded everything.

In a way I think it’s probably a better way to start out as I wasn’t “trying to hit my macros” or anything, I was just eating/drinking freely to satiety – with my usual heavy bias toward fatty red meat and low carb booze.

So – I’ve finally finished collating the food data for Feb (the bio data is still there waiting to be entered), and it’s pretty interesting, for me at least.

Unfortunately there’s a whole week where I stayed out with family – mostly stuck to meat but had some of their food too (auntie I stayed with is a psuedo-vego), however I drank TONS of beer (nowadays beer is a couple bottles a couple times a month, I stick to spirits and vino).

Anyhoo here’s the monthly totals and daily averages:

So yeah, 17kg of meat etc. and 6.7kg of PURE FAT BABY RAWWWRRRR.

Now, the fun thing is that I’ve separated all the foods into a bunch of categories, so it’s pretty easy to find confounders in there. (I have a VERY comprehensive dataset)

For eg the plant-based section where I consumed 1.5kg worth over the month breaks down like this:

* 470g of nuts (mostly macadamias, ~80% fat)
* 225g of “green fibrous” veggies, so basically a few stalks of asparagus or broccoli or bok choy
* 350g of “carby” veg – this will almost entirely be onions and garlic, maybe some corn
* 255g of “grains” – there was a Pad Thai in there, and I went on THREE wine tasting tours so crackers etc
* 209g of sugar – start of the month was Chinese NY, went to a banquet 2 nights in a row, avoided most carby stuff but a couple things were covered in sugar, but I dare say most of the sugar I consumed is from dark chocolate a couple times a week

So in the end when you see it that way, 1/3 is nuts, 1/3 is “acceptable” plants, the rest is grains and sugar junk (however I still consider dark choc to be “good”).

As to the total carb count being so high, in the end it’s an average of ~53g a day which I was surprised at, given that this was actually a VERY carby month, mostly because of the grog (36 beers, 161 wines!).

Oh and this wasn’t about weight and shit, I just wanted to get a baseline of my daily consumption (understand this is a festival month so likely a bit indulgent) but anyhoo just how much weight did I gain by consuming >4k calories a day in mostly fat and alcohol and being almost completely sedentary?

Minus 3kg.

The BMR calcs around the place say I’ve somehow David Copperfielded about 50,000 calories. Oops, my bad.

So, an average day in the life of Ash circa Feb 2014 looked like this:

* 350g red meat
* 80g of fish
* 70g of supplemented fat (butter/oil sauces)
* 1 egg
* 50g of chicken
* 17g of nuts (macadamia mostly, otherwise almonds/cashews)
* 16g of bacon
* 16g of cheese
* 14ml of cream
* 12.5g of onion/garlic/mushroom
* 9g of bread/pasta/crackers
* 8g of green leafy veg
* 7.5g of sugar (dark chocolate)
* 3 shots of vodka
* 3 glasses of red wine
* 2.5 glasses of white wine/bubbles
* 1.3 beers

Now there are TONS of confounders in recording the data. I weighed probably 1/3 of my meals – each of the damn stupid parts of it. As it turns out, I can eyeball it pretty well. But some of the times how the hell do I know how much fat is in that steak? How much of the butter mushroom sauce is left on the plate if I don’t lick it clean?

Think that’s stupid? Hey one lick of your plate could be 40 calories of nice fatty sauce – that’s 4lbs of fat that the calculators are telling you that you’ll gain in the next year if you do that.

That’s right – TEN YEARS OF LICKING YOUR PLATE CLEAN = 40LBS OF OBESITY.

So let this be a public service announcement to you all: Never, ever, lick the plate.

PLATE-LICKING IS THE CAUSE OF OBESITY.