About a year ago Mr C and I got serious about watching what we ate. We are both avid food lovers and can easily get carried away. But, our bodies were not thriving on the copious goodnesses we put in them. And, worse, we were realising we didn't like our bodies much. And that just wouldn't do.
We are both massive geeks, so we researched what we should do next. Google saw an onslaught of searches like "calorie allowance", "bmr", "weight loss", "magic diet pill". Pretty much all results showed a honking big arrow pointing at change your eating habits here. And so we did.
We kept up with the googling, reading blogs, articles, basically anything that would teach us how we were meant to defeat and conquer. We stumbled upon a show called X Weighted or some such nonsense that was Canadian based [hello canucks!] with a semi-compassionate-obnoxious host who would try to teach people how to eat well and exercise. We watched the show maybe 6 times and then Mr CompassiObnoxious became too much for us to bear and we canned it.
One of the shows included a meeting between a successful weight loser and someone in progress - some true gems of wisdom were passed on and one stuck with me - losing weight, is 75% what you eat and 25% what you do. Call me slow but I had this silly idea that if you exercised hard regularly you could eat anything and be slim. This really got me thinking and re-examining the whole calories in vs calories out paradigm. A one hour bike ride does not equal a burger or chocolate bar.
I think of that rule pretty regularly, I don't necessarily agree with the percentage breakdown but it reminds me that weight loss, and indeed being healthy, takes both eating well and moving well.
I think at times I do make the mistake of thinking "I've exercised so I can afford to eat some high calorie treat". But bit-by-bit I'm beginning to classify food and exercise into completely different categories based on how they make me feel not just the calories they add to, or subtract from, my booty.
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