What I Measure and Why

Having just posted What I Track and Why I decided I'd mention what I measure, since that's the flipside of what I track.

In this context I mean what I measure when it comes to food.  I once followed the Zone Diet very strictly, and performed more than my fair share of weighing and measuring.  That was a pain, especially since I was trying hard to eat 5 to 6 times per day.

In fact, it all seems pretty crazy looking back on it.  I would prepare food for the day, carefully weighing and measure proteins, carbs and fats.  I remember packing a cooler so I would never be without food.  I was once so proud of how I could get a days worth of food in the cooler and be assured I would not have to resort to eating anything else. 

Wow, how frail we humans must be if that is required for optimal health.  I sure don't see anything similar in the rest of the animal kingdom.  Perhaps the dinosaurs died off because they ran out of coolers...who knows?

In most ways I'm now at the opposite end of the spectrum.  I eat once or twice or very occasionally three times per day.  And my weighing and measuring occurs very rarely and is mainly there to support certain minimums I want to achieve in protein and carbs versus an obsessive need to achieve some exact ratio.

As an example, I try to get about 80% of my daily carbs in a post workout meal.  A pound of sweet potato fits the bill nicely.  So when I cook my post workout  meal, I weigh the sweet potato to make sure I get at least that.  I'm not anal about it, I just shoot for between 16 and 20 ounces of raw sweet potato, and then start cooking that amount. 

As far as protein, I like to get a big chunk of protein in my post workout meal as well so a pound of grass fed beef works perfectly.  Most times I don't even need to measure it, since the packages we get are usually between 16 and 20 ounces.

So for that meal, I weigh the sweet potato to make sure I get enough and throw it in with a package of beef.  If I want some onion in there as well, I'll just slice some up.  It's more carbs, but who cares?  It just doesn't have to be that precise.

It is, however, easy for me to under-eat when it comes to carbs and weighing it is my way of making sure I don't start cutting back unintentionally.  Old habits die hard, and without keeping some checks and balances it would be easy to start eating too little, especially since I'm seldom hungry.

Other than that, I don't weigh or measure much.  On my rest days, I still eat some sweet potato, but just eyeball it to be about 1/3-1/4 of what I eat on workout days.  It's not uncommon to make a fritata with half an onion, some sweet potato and 4-7 eggs.  I might throw in some leftovers as well, since that's an easy way to use up some leftover meat.

Again, the goal in all this is to meet some minimums, not to try to achieve some weird balance of carbs and protein.  Since this mainly applies on days that I cook a post workout meal, that means I'm turning to the scale 4-5 times a week to weigh one thing.  In the past, I'd have done double that on a single day, and it was very strictly applied as well.

It's not neurotic, time consuming, or obsessive. 

I can't say the same thing about weighing lunch meat, measuring berries, and counting out exactly 12 almonds just to make one meal.  And to be clear about the almonds, it was never 11 or 13, it had to be 12!  Any ex-Zoners out there know what I'm talking about?

Simple is good.