Phase 2, Day 25

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Breakfast: small can of V-8; two veggie to-go quiches

Lunch: potato gnocchi with stewed tomatoes; really large wild mushrooms salad; whole grain hearth roll dipped in a little olive oil; iced tea; espresso [restaurant meal]

Dinner: tossed salad with cashews and olives; medium cup of vegetable soup; diet kiwi-strawberry Snapple

Exercise: none

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So how do you determine how many calories you burn a day? If you want to be accurate, you have to be anal. In other words, do what I do: spend about a month writing down every single thing you eat, in correct portions, and use a website like fitday.com or foodcount.com (in addition to the nutrition panels on any prepared foods you eat) to calculate calories. Sometimes you'll have to estimate, but these resources will give you the information you need to be pretty precise in your guesses.

Before you start, weigh yourself first thing in the morning. At the end of the month, weigh yourself again, first thing in the morning. (Better still, weigh yourself every day at the same time of the day for the first three or four days, and average that number to get your "starting weight" value. Do the same at the end of the month for your "ending weight.") When the month is up, if you gained no weight at all, then add up all the calories you ate that month, and divide this by the number of days in the month. That's how many calories you can eat a day and neither gain nor lose. If you lost weight during the month, then add up all the calories you ate, subtract 3500 calories for every pound you lost, divide the total by the number of days, and *that's* your number. If you gained, do the same thing, but add 3500 calories for every pound.

Doing this takes a commitment of about 15 minutes every day to record your diet in a spreadsheet program (like Excel or Lotus), and look up the calories in the food you eat. A lot of people don't want to spend fifteen minutes a day to obsess over what they stick in their mouths. I can't say I blame them. I'd be lying if I tried to pretend it isn't a pain to keep track. However, it's the only thing that is 100% accurate for *you*.

What about rules of thumb? Here's one: for a moderately active, medium-framed young man, who spends at least a few hours a day moving around rather than sitting on his duff in front of a desk or on a couch, multiply bodyweight in pounds by 15. This is the number of calories he can eat each day and not gain weight. So, a 150 lb. man can eat 150 X 15 or 2225 calories a day. Approximately. *Very* approximately.

What if you are not a man? More/less active? Older? Big boned or small framed? Heavily muscled, or the kind of person who gets sand kicked in his face at the beach? All of these things are going to shift that rule of thumb around. Sometimes a lot. But you need precision, you say! Here's one thing you can do: go to this website and input the variables it asks for. You will get two numbers. One is your "B.E.E." or "basal energy expenditure," and will be very low. This is the number that you need to stay alive, basically. If you eat something, you burn calories digesting. If you talk or even think hard, you are going to burn a few calories. Certainly if you walk around, clean house, run to the bus, do wind sprints, etc., you burn even more. The B.E.E. is your absolute baseline energy expenditure needed to keep you alive (and not even alive and awake. Note there is no difference in B.E.E. between those who are bedridden, versus those who are "ambulatory." When they say "basal," they really mean "basal.")

So how much do you burn above your B.E.E.? Well, that's extremely variable, and almost entirely determined by your lifestyle. Find any one of the innumerable sites out there, like this one, that tell you how many calories you will burn doing various daily activities and exercises. These aren't perfect, because, for instance, a 200-pound person burns more in an hour of running than a 100-pound person. But it's better than nothing.

However,even if you carefully calculate the calories you burn every hour of the day, and add that to your B.E.E., you still are not going to get an accurate daily caloric value for you. Specifically, the number you calculate will still be too low. Remember, you use up calories digesting food, and talking and gesticulating and using your noggin, and laughing and kicking your leg absent-mindedly while you sit at a desk. The calories you burn doing these things are going to be very, very hard to calculate--not only because I don't know where you'd find a place that tells you what the average person burns doing these things, but because you probably don't even notice you are doing most of them. To make matters worse, on any given day, your activities are going to vary a lot. You'd have to calculate these numbers over the course of at least a week, and then average.

Now, the final insult: the B.E.E. is just a numerical formula based on what *typical* people of a given height, weight, age and gender burn. If you are more naturally heavily-muscled or heavy-boned than the typical person, for instance, the B.E.E. isn't even going to be the ideal starting point for you to add your lifestyle-calories to.

Can't we just rely on the second number the website calculator gives us, the "Caloric Requirement"?, you may ask. Look, we're trying to be accurate here! Work with me! Seriously, that number strikes me as low, except for an almost completely sedentary person. And again, it's a number meant for an average person--and pretty much nobody is the average person. Certainly not you or me!

What it all comes down to is this: daily caloric requirements are incredibly variable. The number of factors that goes into determining them make even the most sophisticated calculators out there woefully inadequate for anyone seeking a little precision. If it's precision you're after, you really are stuck with my month-long-food-diary technique. (And even that should be redone every couple of years, or with any major lifestyle change, like starting up an exercise routine or changing jobs or having kids.) On the other hand, do you really need precision? Eat until you're full, and then stop. Eat healthy food. Don't count calories. Don't obsess.

Leave that to me.