Food budgets - an accidental lesson in diet

Nearly two months ago the confluence of two events led me on a journey of  discovery about myself I didn't even know I was embarking on.  These two events included; being asked what I had eaten for breakfast at the start of a course I was attending - I had had nothing but felt it easier to lie to fend off the "breakfast is the most important meal of the day" rejoinder  and the serendipitous introduction of a smart phone calorie counter application in my life.  These two independent events initiated a series of lifestyle changes I wasn't looking for, didn't think I needed yet have had a profound impact on my life.

In a nut shell I have lost 8 kg (17.6lbs) in 8 weeks, cured myself of chronic heartburn and developed an ability to run between 5 to 10 km daily.  This has been encouraged and fostered by measurement and feedback - not unlike how the consumption graph on your car's dashboard encourages more fuel efficient driving.

Let me get something out the way before I begin to explain myself - for much of my life I have typically eaten anything I wanted with the only consideration being cost.  Over the last two years I have moved to the top of my BMI range from somewhere in the middle.  I would have been oblivious to this except that I  had also changed from the 32" waist to a 34" waist.  This all occurs slowly, with stealth and in a manner that leads one to suspect that clothes are shrinking, that clothing manufacturers are changing their designs and sizing templates.  With such naivety I can hardly describe myself as a life coach or nutritionist so feel free to ignore or dismiss my lessons as not applying to your particular circumstances.  I also would not be surprised is my lessons are already outlined in numerous dietary books and self help programs but if so I haven't read them - ironically I am not that interested.

So Lesson one:  "We generally are rubbish at predicting calorie counts for the food we eat"

Using MyFitnessPal I either scanned various products bar codes, or read the nutritional information, to see how accurately I could predict how many calories it contained.  I was rubbish at this - so rubbish that I might as well have just picked a random number.  

So Lesson two:  "Know what your food calorie budget is" 

This is where the accidental lesson began.  I set a target to loose 7kg (13lbs).  I wasn't particularly concerned with how quickly this happened just that it would eventually happen.  Based on a weight loss of 1lbs (0.45Kg) per week I set myself a target of of 1700 calories a day.  Not only had I never before been on any diet of any kind, I had no idea how much food this was. 

So Lesson three:  "Know what many calories are burnt when exercising"

Now if one is typically eating in excess of 2000 calories a day you will be hungry if you cut back.  When living off a financial budget you don't just have to limit what you buy, you can also find ways to earn more.  Equally with calorific budgets - the secret is exercise.  If you want to eat 2300 calories a day then ensure that you exercise for 600 calories.  In my case this equates to 40 minute run.

So Lesson four:  "Weight change is related to calories consumed less calories burned"

We typically perform financial budgets on a monthly basis but food budgets are best done on a daily basis.  The amount you exercise today effects the amount to can eat today.  Using this approach you can increase or decrease your exercise on a daily basis to account for the meal out or drinks you are having after work.

I believe the Atkins and Paleo diets are short sighted for the following reasons:

• They tell you what to eat instead of equipping you with the knowledge needed to modify your lifestyle.
• Saying you must NOT eat some foods but can eat as much as you want of other foods is not sustainable in the long term.  It is like deciding you will save money by only buying "yellow or red" items.  You will save money briefly on some impulse purchases but ultimately you will fold and abandon this crazy, illogical approach to economy.
• Palaeolithic people spent lots of time and effort gathering food and surviving.   They had shorter lives and spent much of their time in an urgent quest for food.
• They are diet fads, followed by purveyors of pseudo science and those who care more to make a quick buck on a diet program than your health.  
• Any diet fad that denies lesson four is a pseudo science.

There is no magic involved in loosing weight - you either eat fewer calories, exercise more or better yet both.  Why waste time and often money on crazy diet plans that are not designed to modify your eating and exercising habits for life?  It is not a healthy strategy to adopt these high protein, low carbohydrate diets over an extended period of time so why adopt them for even a short period of time.   

So Lesson five:  "Eat what you like most and is healthy BUT stay within your calorific budget"

When forced to eat within a caloric limit I became very discerning about what I ate.  Was the fudge brownie ice-cream (260 calories)  preferable to a chocolate fudge cake (270 calories) or indeed a 2 finger Kit-Kat (107 calories).  My choice might change on a daily basis but as I control what I eat I can weigh up pleasure and impact on my limited budget.

So Lesson six: "Eat breakfast"

Over a number of days I noticed that on days that I had larger breakfast I would eat less at lunch time and less in the evening.  For many years I have skipped both lunch and breakfast and then had a large evening meal.  This meal is typically equivalent to all the calories I eat spread over the entire day.   However when you are really, really hungry you don't make rational choices about what you eat and thus eat the easiest and quickest food.  This is usually not conducive to healthy eating.

Since eating breakfast and hence less in the evening I no longer suffer heart burn, a problem that has plagued me for the last couple of  years.  This was sometimes so bad that I would wake up in the night in absolute agony.  I haven't experienced this once in the last 8 weeks.

So Lesson seven: "Abandon foods that can be avoided with only short term discomfort but with long term benefits"

When making financial savings it is better to reduce your ongoing costs instead of once off costs.  Likewise it is better to give up full cream milk or sugar in coffee instead of a rejecting a slice of Xmas cake.  The former choice will save you calories for the rest of your life while the later can be offset by either exercise or another once off food sacrifice - you decide.

Lastly Lesson eight: "Use geeky tools to make it fun - the data doesn't lie"

With smart phones it is easier than ever to monitor what you eat.  It is often as simple as scanning the bar code of the snack or food you have eaten see MyFitnessPal .  It is also easy to automatically log your exercise using applications such as RunKeeper.  This will map your route, distance and calories burned based on the speed, distance and elevation.  Using these tools has been been informative, relatively easy and resulted in me loosing 8 kg (17.6lbs) in 8 weeks that has included Xmas and new year.

The Unintended Consequences of Moving Into the Cloud

One of my new year’s resolutions was to become more virtual and less tangible - both concepts I am afraid I’ll need to explain. For several years I have purchased newspapers several times a week, most recently from the corner store, but for long periods delivered to our door if we could be assured that it would arrive before we left for work. Morning news is old news by the evening.  

We have previously bought music on iTunes, at least until we as a family fell out of love with Apple. We have bought music and books from Amazon, even relying on Amazon prime for cheap and fast physical delivery. We have received two DVDs, and later blu-ray discs, on a weekly basis from LoveFilm and somewhat less frequently when we were busy or the disc selection was, in retrospect a horrible mistake. There were many of these mistakes and they would sit under the TV taunting us to either watch them or admit defeat and return them unwatched.

This has all changed. Some of the changes are good, some bad and some of the consequences are surprising and unintended.

My to-do/resolution list included the following;

1. subscribe to digital editions of newspapers only
2. throw out all my music collection, it was not that big anyway and it was to much work to collate it, music was lost between devices.
3. cancel the dvd/blu-ray by post deal. Those return envelopes drive me crazy.

This list has given rise the following actions:

1. Upgraded the broadband connection from 30Mb to 100Mb - cost £10 more per month
2. Subscribed to Kindle edition of Guardian - cost £9.99 per month - savings of about £19 per month.
3. Upgraded to Spotify Premium - free for six months with broadband upgrade deal - thereafter £9.99.
4. Subscribed to Netflix streaming and cancelled LoveFilm postal subscription - a saving of £2.00 per month.
5. Moved to a cloud backup solution - perpetual backup of new and modified files - no cost, included with the broadband package

A savings of £11 per month.

Although we have been doing this for less than a month it is clear that there are some distinct advantages. Notably Annalise and I each get to read the paper on the kindle and tablet devices as early as we can open our eyes each morning. Reading the "paper" (will the term have any meaning in the future?) on these devices at the breakfast table amongst the coffee, bagels and cereal bowls is much easier as it takes up little space and the cat appears to be less inclined to pounce on it.

The side effects are surprising - I visit the corner store less often - in fact I have yet to visit them this year. There is no negotiation with others for the various sections of the paper. There are thus no impulse purchases resulting in healthier eating and fewer arguments, at least about who gets which section of the paper. I do however feel less connected to the local community as we have previously interacted with the people working in the corner store. Also, in a twisted sense of logic, because our recycling bin is half empty at the end of week it actually feels less green.

Two of our kids have had jobs delivering papers. Is this one job, open to 13 year olds, destined to go they way of the chimney sweep?

The use of Spotify has increased the extent to which we listen to music. We share the account within the family and thus share and exchange play lists. The music no longer resides on individual iPhone, Android or computers but is cloud based and accessible by everyone. We do make offline play-lists an these are downloaded to the device, so that when we are going on car trips or holiday we don’t need to stream music over expensive or non-existent mobile data streams. This whole experience has been extremely successful. The only negative is that the Spotify premium only allows one device on-line and active at a time and this means that when Annalise and I are jogging I usually need to put my phone in "airplane" mode.

The LoveFilm operating model allows for several queues to be managed by different members of the family. While we see movies in the theatre about one or twice a month we add current movies to the LoveFilm queue and then, surprise surprise, they arrive several months later when they are released on DVD. We often received discs we no longer wanted or had seen in the interim. Having two discs in the house meant that these were chosen by at most two people and invariably they were Shrek 2 and Shrek 3, actually this only occurred once after which we banned Sophie from going near the disc queues.  


Worse was when one started the movie and then decided it wasn’t worth continuing we had nothing else to watch. I am a great believer that time is far to precious to waste watching a poor movie. So how does changing to a “watch instantly” model alter the dynamics? For one there is less to watch. Netflix doesn't have my favourite movie “Amelie” nor many others. It does has lots to watch though and one chooses them as you sit down to watch with everyone present. This is much more democratic and spontaneous. It is also cheaper and better yet we share it with Emily while she is at University. It also streams to our phones, tablets, computers and of course the TV. We get less post and we never visit the post box any more. Of course this is Royal Mail's loss.

I have been struck by the implications for society if everyone were to do what we have done. The postal service would carry less post and the postman visit us less. Corner stores would do less business and may well go out of business. We would see less of others in our street. I should note that we always do our grocery shopping on line and it is very seldom that we visit a physical supermarket.

We have a wall in the lounge devoted to books, we love books. However the reading experience of electronic books on the kindle is very good and in some way preferable to a physical book. But what about the book shelves? Are they destined to carry books from a special era seen as quaint by future generations?


We are not throwing out the paper books and in fact over Christmas we gave each other more paper books than e-books but the tide is turning and we are spending less and less on paper and more money on e-books. It worries me that these books in kindle format and they are propriety and non-transferable though. Again each e-book purchased is one less parcel delivered through the post.


Is it inevitable that we while becoming more connected with people on the virtual world we will become less connected with those within our physical community?