Calories In

About ten years ago, before I became an Ironman triathlete, I was trying to lose weight. Why was I trying to lose weight? Pretty much the reasons most women want to lose weight. I had put on pounds through five pregnancies and was in my thirties and feeling like I had “let myself go.” I wanted to look like I had when I was seventeen, and to me that meant getting back down to the same number on the scale that I had been then. For me, that was 115.

I am only 5'2” tall, and I never thought of myself as thin when I was in high school. In fact, in junior high, I thought of myself as fat and I hated PE so much that I worked out a way never to do PE again in high school. I was tired of being the fat girl that no one wanted on their team. It is amusing to me as an adult to look back at my photos of myself in junior high and high school and realize that I looked in the mirror and often thought I was fat. Because all I wanted when I was 30 was to get back to the size I had been then.

I signed up for an on-line diet program that a relative recommended. This program was ingenious! Not only did it give you an approved number of calories per day for the weight goal you said you wanted to achieve. It also allowed you to log in what food you ate. And then it adjusted each day depending on what the scale told it you needed to do. So if you went up a pound, the program automatically told you you had to cut even more calories than you had previously planned on. I suppose it would do the reverse if you went down more weight than expected, but this never happened to me.

I will say that the relative who had recommended this program was a man. I think that most men have a completely different experience in trying to lose weight than women do. They always talk about numbers and how it's all about calories in and calories out. It's a simple mathematical calculation, right? Only it isn't for most women. Our bodies work against us. Perhaps because we are working against them, trying to get ourselves to a weight that isn't reasonable or rational. We don't want to be “healthy.” We want to be “fabulous” and that means “thin beyond any reasonable expectation.”

I wanted to be 115 again, and I was at that point at about 135. This brilliant diet program also gave bonus calories if you exercised. I had always been the kind of person who enjoyed exercise and movement, so long as it wasn't judged or coordinated by a team effort. I swam or ran most days because I liked it. I wasn't interested at that time in being competitive about it. But I started exercising more so that I could “earn” more calories from my diet program. It all made sense, right? Calories in, calories out.

But it didn't work for me. This is a familiar story to most women, I am sure. I carefully weighed and measured my food. I ate carrots and celery to fill my stomach. I ate salads for lunch with maybe a soup or a piece of bread on the side. One piece of bread. I ate oatmeal for breakfast because it was supposed to stay with you longer. I had tiny little portions of treats at the end of the day as a reward for hitting my calorie goal for the day. And it didn't work. I lost a few pounds in the first few weeks, but then I hit a plateau. For nearly six weeks, I was counting calories, feeling hungry all the time, exercising like you're supposed to, and I didn't lose an ounce. In fact, I was pretty sure I was gaining weight.

I called my male relative and talked to him about the problem. He insisted that I just needed to weigh and measure more accurately. The laws of the universe do not change for one person, he insisted. Calories in, calories out. Maybe I needed to exercise more? And he told me that having three small tacos for dinner was just “too much.” I had to really make “sacrifices” if I wanted to lose weight.

The next day, I went running for six miles. I felt good in the mornings, and that was when I always exercised. But when I got home, my diet program had cut me down to about six hundred calories a day to reach my goal, because I hadn't lost anything and my end date was coming up quickly. It was panicked and was trying to do whatever it could to help me reach my goal. It promised that if you followed it, you would reach your goal weight.

I ate my oatmeal and I was still starving. I tried to exercise self-control. I ate more carrots and celery. And then I lay on the couch and felt like I was going to die. I was pretty sure I could feel my body eating itself. It was crying out for food and I was doing everything I could to ignore it. I just needed to train it to get used to fewer calories. I needed to get used to feeling hungry all the time if I wanted the body I dreamed of. Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, right?

In that moment of feeling like death, I thought about my future. I realized I could spend it wanting to be thinner than I am and being hungry every moment of my life. Or I could accept my body and my weight and move on. I could eat the food that my body said I needed to it, ignore the stupid diet program that thought it could outwit the pre-programmed weight my body wanted to be at. I could give up diets and eat well. And I chose to eat well.

I never logged into that diet program again. I do still have a lingering habit of counting calories, I admit. But I don't let myself go hungry. Not ever. Hungry is your body telling you that you need to it. Calories in, calories out just doesn't seem to work for me. My body works against it. I'm not saying the laws of the universe don't apply. I'm just saying that your metabolism can change and you suddenly don't burn calories that you would normally burn because your body doesn't want to burn them. It feels threatened.

When I look in the mirror, I am sometimes happy with what I see. I sometimes still wish I could go back to my high school weight. I wish I had a flat stomach. I wish I didn't have a sagging behind. Even after doing four full Ironman competitions and a hundred competitive races in the years since this diet disaster, I weight between 125 and 130. If I weighed less, would I be faster? Maybe. But I doubt it. Because I would be spending too much time on the couch, wishing I could eat to get up and really hit my intervals hard. I am what I am. I'm never going to be the “thin” I was in high school, which I thought was “fat.” But I am also never going to be hungry again.

This is what I learned: your body is never going to get used to being hungry. It's just going to shut down and stop burning calories. And if things get really bad, it will send more and more drastic message to “EAT!” through more and more desperate hungry signals. And after that, it will shut down and take away all your energy and make you lie on a couch until you realize that food isn't your enemy and that calories in, calories out doesn't matter. What matters is calories in.