MyFitnessPainInTheAss

A lot of people have been wondering how I've been keeping track of all my caloric happenings. The answer is a little website, MyFitnessPal. It's super simple, you just type in what you just ate, how much of it you ate, and it spits out how many calories it cost and how many you have left for the rest of the day. I think of MyFitnessPal as a computer generated prison guard keeping me safely locked in solitary confinement. The kind of guard who's kinda sorta your buddy and who runs the black market cigarette trade between the other inmates, but will still beat you stupid with his club if you get out of line.

My first experience with the website did not go so well. I wanted to see what a normal day of eating would look like in numeric form. Turns out I overshot my 1500 calorie goal. By a lot. I think the final number was somewhere around 2400. Not a great start, I grant you, but since then I've been able to keep under my goal every day but one (the ill-fated Beef O'Brady's experience I blogged about earlier). A pretty massive accomplishment considering where I came from.

Well now it seems I have a brand new problem. The school year has begun and I'm busy. Crazy busy. So busy that I'm forgetting to do things like eat and sleep, you know, minor things like that. The end result is that I'm staying way under 1500 calories a day without even trying. Now in my mind I'm thinking this is great. I'm busy, I'm active, I'm eating less food... what's not to like? MyFitnessPal should be singing my praises right now right? Of course not! Today I started getting warning messages (in bright red no less) on the website alerting me that I am eating too few calories and that I need to (are you f-ing kidding me?) eat more!

To recap: the website that has taken away my joy, my passion, my ever so lovely food... is telling me that I need to eat more food. Apparently I'm being TOO healthy and making too many good food choices. It was at this point that I began to look for my sledgehammer so I could put both my computer and myself out of our collective miseries. I can't win for losing for Christ's sake. But I figure, what the hell... let's try this whole "eating more" thing. Here's what transpired today:

Today was Open House at my school which meant I had to pack lunch and dinner. I skipped breakfast as always because I can't eat early in the morning (I drink coffee like a tweaking camel, but no food). For lunch I went with a can of tuna fish, mixed with light mayo and a chopped up tomato (no bread of course, because carbs are the Devil's work!). I also had a pear and a banana. I'm so healthy it makes me sick. For dinner I brought leftovers with me... 8 oz. of pork sirloin chop and a cup of broccoli. After adding that all up into MyFitnessPal I get a grand total of about 700 calories. Well shit, I'm 800 calories short so now what?

I get home and as it just so happens my fantastic wife took the kids out for pizza in my absence. Naturally the first words out of my mouth (long before things like "How was your day?" "How were the kids?", etc) were "Any left?" And as it turns out there was some left... 3 slices of Little Cesear's pepperoni pizza. Well hot diddle-y damn... looks like I'm having my happy ass some pizza tonight! I tap dance into the kitchen, floating on a cloud of fluffy bunnies and unicorns. There on the counter I found the blessed box, wherein I found 3 slices of room temperature (the ideal temperature for pizza by the way) pepperoni covered glory. Please note that just writing those words made me mildly erect.

I savor my first bite of pizza in over a month. I savor it the way a 40-year old virgin savors his wedding night. Every bite is a choir of angels in my mouth, all singing the Hallelujah Chorus to my taste buds. At this point I'm not eating this pizza... I'm romancing this pizza. I'm doing PG-13 things to this pizza. The pizza and I are rounding second base and sliding into third. It was good goddamn pizza. After my post-pizza cool down (seriously, if there was a cigarette in the house I would have smoked it) I hop onto my computer to tell MyFitnessPal the good news. I'm still in the middle of my afterglow as I tell MyFitnessPal what I just ate. And after a couple seconds MyFitnessPal returns the following information:

3/8 of Little Cesear's Pizza (pepperoni): Total calories 840
Your total calorie intake for the day: 1540
You have gone over your maximum allowed calories for the day

Damn you MyFitnessPal... damn you to hell.