Food, Glorious Food!

One of the things I'm most looking forward to about training for the marathon is being able to eat pretty much whatever I want. If I feel like a Snickers at 3:00, no problem, I'll be running that off at 6:00 anyway. However, I need to keep in mind that that's not going to be a valid excuse until I start piling on serious miles per week, and right now I'm only running 9 to 12. That's not enough for me to have too many splurge meals or ridiculous snacks.

Still, I made a great start on consuming mass calories today. It's not going to look so awesome when I step on the scale tomorrow morning, but lunch was a gluttonous, caloric feast. I ate about 1600 calories, which came in the form of a bacon cheeseburger and garlic fries from Kidd Valley. And it was worth every single bite. It also showed me exactly where all of my weight gain the last couple of years came from. I didn't eat at Kidd Valley all the time, but I was eating at least enough to get that many calories in a single meal once a week, usually on Saturdays. That never stopped me from having something almost as bad for dinner. Sunday through Friday eating wasn't any better. I'd eat almost nothing for breakfast, a pretty large lunch, an even larger dinner, and I'd throw in some snacks just for good measure. I'm actually amazed that I never saw the scale top 200 pounds.

I made adjustments to my diet at the first of the year. See, my first goal for 2009 was to run a half marathon (now morphed to full marathon), but a second and closely related goal is to lose 30 pounds. I figured that all the running would make the pounds naturally fall off, and I think for the most part that was right. I've had a few weeks where there was no running at all but some good weight loss, but I'll chalk that up to my body just being confused about what's going on. I say I made changes to my diet, but I didn't change what I ate, just how much of it I did and how often. I now space four roughly 200 calorie snack/meals throughout the day and I have a 300-400 calorie lunch and about the same for dinner. Once I lose another four pounds I'll be able to bump my caloric intake up into a maintenance level of around 2000 calories a day. I'm also watching how my food breaks down. Most of the writing I've seen about runners talks about how much they need carbs before runs and proteins after. I'm not sure how successful I'm being, but I'm trying to make sure I get some of both whenever I can.

So, bottom line. Bacon cheeseburgers and garlic fries are good, and if you have a Kidd Valley near you I highly recommend you try both of theirs. But it's not something that I should make a habit out of eating. Still, it will be nice to be able to shove whatever in my mouth and know that I'm not overdoing it because I'll be burning it off soon.