Flashback: February 14Well, I promised that I would post an example of a day when I consumed more calories than I needed while (in my mind!) following the McDougall program. This was Valentine's Day, February 14. Let me walk you through it.
February 14 was a day when I ate breakfast. It was a good breakfast; 1/2 cup (measured dry) of oats with half a banana and a few blueberries. I also had coffee with soymilk and 2 teaspoons of sugar.
I worked out on the treadmill for half an hour, covering about 2 miles. I was proud that I got some exercise even though I was very busy that day with a stressful time-sensitive project. Yay me!
For lunch I had my favorite big salad, plus a plate of crunchy potatoes like I usually have on Friday. Yep, I was being good. I didn't buy any sugary treats for myself at the supermarket, even though it was Valentine's Day and candy was in my face everywhere I went. We had agreed not to go out to dinner, but to have a special dinner at home. I decided that I would make a healthy, McDougall friendly dessert to go with our Valentine's Day dinner of homemade pizza. I also bought a bottle of wine (and candles....but we didn't eat those).
Sipping a little wine while making the pizza made me feel slightly less concerned about the homemade oil-free tortilla chips that I was nibbling on while working in the kitchen. It was okay....they were just whole corn tortillas, baked....and I didn't even eat that many.
While waiting for the pizza dough to rise, I made a nice, healthy dessert: blackberry cobbler. The recipe was mostly berries (which we all know are low in calories), along with a cup of whole-wheat flour and a modest half cup of sugar, plus a little soymilk to moisten it. Completely harmless.
I had just one slice of pizza for dinner (as I usually do), along with lots of steamed asparagus. By the end of dinner I had drunk 2 ordinary-sized glasses of wine, not that much. So, I had plenty of room for blackberry cobbler. I polished off a generous serving and then I went back into the kitchen and ate some more, directly from the pan -- just standing there spooning up cobbler. Before I knew it, 2/3 of the 8" x 8" square pan was gone. Well, an 8" x 8" pan is not that big. And it was mostly berries anyway, with no added fat. I went to bed feeling all virtuous for being so good and NOT having candy on Valentine's Day and NOT going out to eat, and even exercising! True, I had a cup of coffee in the morning....and wine and a few baked tortilla chips...but I'd stuck to a healthy dessert and had eaten well all day long and had plenty of green and yellow vegetables. The following morning, I entered my food into the CRON-o-meter.
OVER 2,800 CALORIES??
And guess how many calories were in that cobbler (the amount that I ate?) OVER NINE HUNDRED!! Oh my. Take a look:
Here is the CRON entry for the cobbler:
Holy heck! There is a reason why flour and sugar (except small amounts on your oatmeal, etc.) aren't allowed on MWL. Now, I admit, if I had eaten a small portion it would have been okay. But honestly....if you cut that cobbler into 9 squares.....I was never going to eat a portion that small. Ironically, the fact that I thought it was "healthy" and on-plan made me feel fine about eating more of it.
To top it all off, my "virtuous" 30 minutes on the treadmill didn't do all that much for me, since the rest of my day was fairly sedentary apart from normal activities. According to Fitbit I burned 1,775 calories that day:
So that is my tale of how I overate by more than 1,000 calories, all while thinking (at the time) that I was being compliant. It could have been so much worse, too, if my meals hadn't been as low in calorie density. It is clear to me how I could easily overeat on a regular basis, gain weight (or not lose), and wonder why. I just wanted to share because it was an "a-ha" moment for me.
By the way, before someone points it out, I know that alcohol and coffee (especially coffee with soymilk and sugar) aren't on plan. But for me, like for many of us, it is easy to sort of put these things in a separate category in our minds and remain in denial about them. We see our compliance in terms of the meals we eat, and make a mental exception for these little extra-curricular indulgences, as if they aren't part of our actual diet. Some of us are so good at this that we can rationalize things like the mini peanut butter cup someone put on our desk at work, the bite of cake we took just to be polite, the cookie that was part of the salad bar, the 3 or 4 potato chips stolen from someone else's plate....but as Dr. Greger says, "your body is never not looking!"