Calorie Intake: What's in a day?

oedipax

Here's something I've been wondering about for a while - say I have a relatively low-calorie day (yesterday I had a 150 calorie breakfast, skipped lunch, and had a 600 calorie dinner with 280 calories of snack afterwards). I also exercised (a mix of walking and jogging for about 1h16m, 5.5 miles total) for an estimated 700 calories burned.

On my current settings, which give me around 1550 calories per day, that leaves me with around 520 left over plus the 700 (again, estimated) that I burned, meaning around 9pm I still had something like 1220 calories to spare.

I didn't eat anything else from that point on, but a little after midnight I went for another snack, about 170 calories worth of almonds. Now I could put this on my calorie log for the new day, where I'm back at 1550 again (which means I'm now cutting into my allowed calories for three meals plus any snacks) or I could backdate the snack to the previous day where I still have plenty of room to spare.

For now I've settled on treating each day as the period during which I was awake - so if I stay up a few hours past midnight and snack during this time, I still treat it as if it were part of the "previous" day's consumption. This is particularly attractive if I've had a big workout on one day and feel like eating some of those calories back. The next day I might not work out, and it stinks to have a post-midnight snack cramp my options for the rest of the next day.

Am I throwing off the accuracy and effectiveness of my plan by doing this? Or does it all wash out in the end since I'll still be under my total limit at the end of the week?

phildawson75

No not at all, thats perfectly fine. Your body can't tell time and works the same 24/7, and you have to think of it as a continuous thing rather than I must eat these calories before the clock strikes midnight. I would add those night snacks as the day before as that's when you did your exercise.

It's all really about cals in vs cals out, rather than time.

cruciia

I've wondered this also. Or whether, if I overeat say 200 calories on Monday, should I just eat 200 less calories than I would have on tuesday to even the amount? It's a tricky subject.

But I do do it how you do it. I treat each "day" as the time that I am awake instead of treating it by time.