The scales dipped below 76kg, meaning it’s the final day of ice cream. I could have done another few days, but I’m looking forward to something savory for a change, and pizza fits the bill!
The day was an even spread of ice cream, with affogato for breakfast, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s “Coconuts for Caramel” for lunch, and a pint (almost) of Haagen Dazs Caramel Cone for dinner. Even though I’ve had it before, I think the Haagen Dazs is one of the best caramel ice creams I’ve had. The Ben & Jerry’s is also great, especially if you like coconut (which I do).
Also huge congrats to all of the Ultraman Florida finishers. I had 2 athletes competing (Amy Craft and Tom Waniewski)… they both put in a huge amount of work and it paid off! They both achieved their goals, through hard work, perseverance, and never giving up.
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Today was my highest calorie intake since starting the project, but I also did a 3 hour ride comprised of 4 x 30 minute tempo intervals at Ironman effort (235w, 243w, 247w and 238w) with 5-10 mins easy riding after each one. Before the ride I had almost a pint of Ben and Jerry’s “The Tonight Dough” plus some coffee, as well as 100g of oatmeal to help fuel the ride. The oatmeal is about 350 calories, so I still got more than 90% of my daily calories just from ice cream. The ride was fueled by 4 x Starbucks ready-to-drink Frappuccinos.
Weight has stabilized in the 76-77kg range so I’m in for at least another day of ice cream (which is good news since there are still a few I’d like to try).
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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This may sound like an odd thing to say when dieting, but the weight is just coming off too quickly!!!
I’m meant to be eating ice cream between the weights of 77kg and 76kg, but by day 3 of ice cream I was tottering on the verge of dropping below 76kg.
My guess is that the burger diet was pretty heavy in sodium, which caused some water retention, now being obliterated by all the sodium-free ice cream. I can tell you it feels pretty strange to be losing weight while eating nothing but ice cream.
However, I’ve bought all this ice cream, so I need to hang in there for at least another day or so and keep the weight above 76kg. Psychologically, this has never happened to me on a diet before. I suppose that is one of the side effects of this project; you don’t want to lose weight too fast, otherwise you don’t get to try all those new ice creams you bought. And on the other hand, if your weight loss stalls, you could get sick of eating a certain food, so you become highly motivated to lose the weight and move on to the next food. I never thought about that when I started this, but it creates a completely new dimension to dieting efforts.
Daily totals were high today, but I did a hard run, plus I wanted to get in some extra calories just to stabilize the weight loss a bit.
3658 calories (445g carbs, 125g fat, 162g protein)
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Today went pretty well. Workouts wise I did an hour easy bike ride in the morning and then a 5 mile run at lunch. The run was kind of average – my intention was to do something like 8 x 1 mile around 6:45/mile, but I just wasn’t feeling it so I cut it down to 5 miles, with only 2 miles at the 6:45 pace. I just didn’t feel well fueled enough, which is pretty common if you’re at a daily calorie deficit. However, it wasn’t too bad considering my diet the past 3 days has been 100% ice cream. Ideally, what I would do is eat something like oatmeal, or scrambled eggs on a few slices of toast about 2 hours before a run like that.
Food wise, it was a very good day. I made a South African drink called a Dom Pedro for dinner, with a great new ice cream from safeway for dessert. It’s the safeway branded “salted caramel pretzel” ice cream. I really enjoyed it! For my post-dessert meal I had 2 servings of Ben and Jerry’s salted caramel core. It wasn’t bad but the safeway one is a lot better.
That protein is way too low – I’m going to rectify that tomorrow with the addition of a few ice cream shakes with some whey powder added in.
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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I learned my lesson from day 1, and left most of the calories for the end of the day. It was a great day to ride outside so I took advantage of the weather with an extended commute (powered by a Good Times spoonbender, which was ok, but not as good as many of the packaged ice creams).
The best ice cream of the day was the Kroger Private Selection Denali Extreme Moose Tracker, which is a good chocolate ice cream with solid chunks of fudge and chocolate. Pretty good, even though chocolate ice cream wouldn’t be my first choice.
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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Ice cream is a broad food group, and I’ll be including many related options in the “allowable foods” list:
– ice cream, gelato, sorbets
– milkshakes, sundaes and other dairy-based desserts
– other dessert type of things like custards
– I can add toppings to the ice creams, for example m&m’s, fudge, chocolate and cookies
– spinach is not allowed
Day 1 of ice was quite badly executed. I started with my first ice cream meal around 11am, and by 4pm I’d eaten my quota for the day of 2100 calories. That left me pretty hungry at dinner time, surrounded by the aroma of roast lamb with nothing to eat. So in future I’m going to leave the bulk of my calories for later on in the day. It’s much easier to suffer earlier than suffer later.
Daily totals: 2417 calories (320g carbs, 107g fat, 48g protein)
(that’s way too little protein, I’ll have to up that by adding some whey to a shake)
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this post is a part of the raceweight project, a “calories in, calories out” experiment to see if I can get to my racing weight eating mainly “bad” foods
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At this time of year, I see so many people “go on a diet” with the goal of losing weight, but with all the rules and restrictions they end up becoming despondent, “cheating” and then feeling guilty about breaking the rules, ultimately leading to them ending their diet and reverting to their previous habits. They do all of this while ignoring the fundamental principle of weight loss; that you should just eat a bit less. It doesn’t really matter if you eat some “bad” foods every now and again, you will still lose weight if your weekly calorie consumption is less than the number of calories you expend. Instead of focusing on restricting types of foods, it can be more beneficial to make sure you add in some nutritious foods, and then outside of that have some freedom about what you eat, but don’t eat too much of it.
To prove my point, I will be aiming to get down from my current weight of 78kg, to my race weight of 73kg before Ironman Boulder in June. I plan to do this by eating predominantly “bad” foods. I went out to the slowtwitch community to get some ideas for these bad foods, which I will eat on my quest to get to race weight. Since all these diets have rules, here are my rules:
I’ll choose one bad food at a time, and eat that until I lose 1kg, after which I’ll move onto the next food.
I plan to get most of my daily calories from this bad food. Over and above that, I can eat what I like. For example to sustain my training needs I need to get in enough protein (about 100-150g per day). So for example if I’m getting most of my calories from pancakes I will need to add in about 400 calories of protein.
I can eat whenever I like. Whether that is one meal a day or six. On most days it will just be one or two meals, because that’s what I’m used to.
So far we are getting a nice list of bad foods. I’m going to start with burgers, and I’ll try to include a mix of fast food burgers and homemade burgers. I have the option of adding fries/chips, but I doubt I’ll be doing that with every meal.
Other foods on the shortlist:
Pizza
Milkshakes / Ice cream
Beer
Cake
Pancakes
Donuts
You can see my weight tracking here, I plan to weigh in at least once a week, probably more often. I expect to see daily variance both up and down, but in general I hope to see a decrease every week.
Here is the tentative schedule:
78-77kg: burgers
77-76kg: pizza
76-75kg: milkshakes / ice cream
75-74kg: beer
74-73kg: pancakes, donuts and cake
The one caveat to the schedule above, is that I have a ski trip planned at the end of March. I think beer is going to be the easiest to fit in with that, since I don’t have to work, or drive anywhere. So I may well adjust that, depending on how the progress goes.
