Friday 15 November 2013

Fat Woman and the disappearing calories

Fat Woman is back logging what she eats and counting her calories. Fat Woman doesn't get why people claim that calorie counting is so hard; it's not like it was in the 1980s (the first time someone gave Fat Girl a calorie book) when you had to weigh food, look up that food in the book, calculate the total and then write it in your paper diary. Now you use an application, put in how much you ate and what you ate and everything is done for you. If you bear in mind that protein and carbohydrates have 4 calories a gram and fat has 9 calories a gram then it makes it fairly easy to estimate anything you aren't making yourself.

Fat Woman had an horrendous session with Personal Trainer and was inclined to treat herself at lunch time. In Fat Woman's strange little mind "treat" now means eight ounces of jacket potato rather than six, and having sweetcorn along with her chicken breast. Fat Woman is as surprised as you are especially as it would have been the perfect day to claim a right to buying and eating at least part of a box of Mr Kipling Frosted Fancies (in shops NOW, only for Christmas!). A chicken and sweetcorn jacket potato might not be everyone's idea of a treat, but when you've had a PT session with Personal Trainer it seems like exactly what you need. Fat Woman is disparaging about sweetcorn as a vegetable, considering it only sightly nutritionally superior to a boiled sweet and a fibre pill, but even Personal Trainer has said that everyone needs a little bit of sugar in their life, although he would prefer it if Fat Woman would eat her afternoon toast without jam. Fat Woman ignores this as Personal Trainer would also rather Fat Woman didn't eat toast. Fat Woman has given up fruit juice but is damned if she's not going to eat bread.

Fat Woman weighed her jacket potato before cooking it. Fat Woman likes to do this because the auto cook function on the microwave requires you to enter the potato weight. Fat Woman also likes to play "guess the weight of the potato" because there is a school of thought amongst Health Professionals that thinks that fat people have no idea of how much they are eating and these Health Professionals like to show fat people different sized samples of food in order to prove it. Fat Woman amazed at Slimming Word with her ability to guess the weight of the potato. Mind you, Fat Woman also remembers asking an American friend to pick up some 6-8oz potatoes at the supermarket. The friend brought back three giant potatoes weighing 2lb each. Fat Woman hasn't seen potatoes that big on sale in a supermarket in ten years or more.

When Fat Woman weighed her jacket potato before cooking it was 230g. When Fat Woman looked at her sightly over cooked jacket potato after cooking it was greatly diminished in size, so she weighed it again. It was 130g. Fat Woman figured that 100g of water disappearing was not a big deal.

Fat Woman went to enter the details of her lunch into her food diary and it occurred to her that she had been assuming that the food she entered the values for uncooked food. Fat Woman double checked and found that 230g of raw potato was listed as 175 calories whilst 130g generic cooked jacket potato was listed as 142 calories.

Fat Woman would like to point out to anyone who thinks this is a minimal difference that such minimal differences are what weight gain is made of, and also that if she wants a square of dark chocolate at the end of the day she has to work really hard to make sure she has enough calories left without being hungry.

Fat Woman is picking the lower value today on the grounds that she never offsets exercise against her calorie intake and so is probably due a few extra calories anyway.

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