I’m 6’2. My body likes to be right around 172lbs. At my heaviest, I was in the mid-180s. I was super soft, but that was like a decade ago and it’s okay. For two years now, I’ve set a goal of getting to 162 before Leadville. The number was somewhat arbitrary, but it turns out it was a good one to choose as it puts my BMI at 20.8. A quick Googling will tell you pros are generally right around 21. Perfect! They obviously have a lower body fat % than me, but that’s something to work on.

Last year
I was fresh off reading Racing Weight (note: they make a cookbook on their philosophy, but it was super uninspiring – get Shalane’s book or Feed Zone instead). I liked a lot of the ideas in the book, but didn’t want to take it too seriously. I ended up coming up with a points based system that had me eating really healthy foods. It had a flaw in that it didn’t limit calories; the goal was to earn points, and sometimes I’d find myself eating something “healthy” when I didn’t need to just to make up for eating something crappy. You can pull down my weekly scoring chart from Google Docs. The idea is to start out with a few of what you consider to be healthy days, figure out what kind of points that means for you (will differ based on bodyweight and metabolism), and strive for that every day. My number was 20ish.

This diet did end up working for me. I reached goal weight a week before the event… and then stopped paying attention and put a few back on before reaching the starting line. Shame on me.

 This year
This time I got serious and counted calories. Rebecca upgraded watches so I bought her Vivoactive HR off of her. It’s been a great device to track my active activities (used to use my phone or a mounted GPS unit), but the biggest advantage is it tracking all the passive stuff; steps now count (the answer is 8000 on days I don’t run or hike), walking up the stairs now count, jumping jacks count (kidding, I don’t do those).

But what about food? MyFitnessPal. It’s really the only player in the game. It can be free with ads and limited functionality, but they got me with a free trial month and I recently subscribed for the year. I only plan to use it a few months a year, but they had some deal where an annual membership was cheaper than trying to manually deal with it each month… and I like supporting products I use. It’s been pretty eye opening to learn the calories in a lot of the things we eat. Did you know fruit basically doesn’t have any? I always thought it did. Vegetables have even less. Bread? Lots, but thats okay.

If there is one problem I have with counting calories it is making sure they’re balanced. The app tracks all of that, but it’s up to me to look at it, and I’ve found myself forgetting to check my macros and micros for days at a time. I’m hitting my calorie number, but could be doing it much healthier. In that sense, my diet from last year was better.

I paired all of this nonsense with a Garmin Index scale. My old scale was old, but still functioning well. It did all the bells and whistles, but wasn’t “connected.” This scale automatically updates my weight, BMI, water %, fat %, and bone weight in my app. Yes, I paid $125 to not have to manually type my weight in (I don’t care about the other metrics and it’s well known that this scale is horrible at actually calculating these – it’s not changed my BF% a tenth of a percent in three months). I also had to go through three units before I got one that “worked.” Garmin is so bad. I cannot recommend this device much less unless all your other Garmin stuff breaks regularly and you want to use it as fodder when support wants you to pay a service fee (this happened with my Edge 520 shortly before writing this – a GPS update bricked it – two years old, $400, they wanted $100 to fix what their software screwed up).

How did this all work? Almost too well. I’m five weeks from race day and I’ve hit my target. Getting there so early, I worry that MyFitnessPal isn’t smart enough to adjust targets when it receives new weight inputs. A shame as that seems like a very basic and simple to implement function. Considering it’s the market leader in the calorie counting app market, is the market ripe for something better? Anyway, I’ve adjusted from “lose weight” to “maintain” and the app is now giving me 500 more calories to play with per day. The timing is perfect because my training just went into overdrive and I’m tired of running on near empty. The added calories will fuel the build quite nicely

I’d love to lower my body fat percentage, but I’m 100% certain my scale wouldn’t tell me if I did so why bother? 😉 Unlike last year, I’ll continue to monitor calories until race day. Following race day I’ll do my best to fatten back up. Ice cream all the things!