But if I do, it's not for lack of trying today. I started off with a reasonably light breakfast -- 2 fried eggs and a mix of kidney beans, mixed vegetables, sliced jalapenos, a little bit of bacon, and some salsa. That and a cup of coffee came to 300 calories. Lunch was more of the bean & veggie mix, plus two scrambled eggs, and a few pieces of grilled chicken breast. All up, 490 calories. That's a total of 790 calories so far for today.
Exercise so far today has been three 15-minute sessions on the cross-trainer. Three hard sessions. First, I upped my pace a little and at the end of the first session, I'd done 5k. I checked back through my RunKeeper data, and that's the first time I've ever done that. Lots of 4.8s, one 4.9, but this morning was the first time I've done 5k in 15 minutes.
Then for my second session, I figured I'd do it again, and push to try to get 5.1k. I ended up with 5.5k! Once I realized that I wasn't going to die afterwards, I was pretty freaking happy with that!
Then for my third session, I decided to just take it easy, not worry about breaking any records, and just do a good, solid session while keeping my pace quick enough that I at least went 4.5k. A couple of minutes into it, I decided to up the resistance, so I took it to level 8 and then to level 9. Level 9 feels like running through water or deep sand. I could definitely feel it, but even with the extra resistance, I finished the 15 minutes with a distance of 5.1k. I'm not sure yet, but I think 5k may be my new baseline. Shit, how'd that happen?
So anyway, all up that 790 calories consumed, and 715 burned, for a net of 70. And I'm not feeling bleh any more. I think that taking a few days off from the exercise, and having a good time with the family yesterday, really helped me feel renewed, and ready to put in a solid effort this week.
My goal this week is to keep my net calories down between 500 and 800 a day. I think that if I can do that, I ought to lose at least 2 kg this week.
Update: Dinner (meatballs, a mix of borlotti (pinto) beans and veggies, plus mashed potatoes for the boys) is over, and the day is nearly done. Dinner plus an after-dinner coffee, and then an after-after-dinner coffee brought my total to 1685 calories. And a ten-minute after-after-dinner-coffee run on the cross-trainer brought my exercise total up to 1115 calories. putting my net calories for the day at 570. That's very nicely within my goal range, so I'm happy to call it quits for the day.
I'd planned to go for another 15 minutes in that last cross-trainer session, but after some sharp pains on the right side of my abdomen, I decided to quit a little after 10 minutes. I'd been going pretty hard, hitting 3k in 8:08, which at the time I thought was a new personal best, but after checking, I see that it isn't. Still, it's a pretty damned good time, and I'm pretty sure the resistance was higher this time.
In any case, that's 70 minutes that I spent on that damned cross-trainer today. And for almost every one of those minutes, I was going at it hard. Every single time I got on the thing, I was huffing and puffing within a minute or two. By the five-minute mark, my legs and lungs were burning, and by the ten-minute mark I was starting to think that maybe being fat isn't all that bad and that I should just fuck off all this diet and exercise bullshit and go get a cheeseburger! And after about 13 or 14 minutes, I was just hoping that I made it to the end without collapsing and falling off the damned thing onto the concrete floor.
So all of the calorie counters calculate a certain number of calories burned based on how many minutes I'm on the thing, but don't take into account the intensity of effort for each of those minutes. Today, I seriously worked that shit!
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