My 5,000 Calorie Day

springlering62
springlering62 Posts: 9,046 Member
edited December 2024 in Health and Weight Loss
For various personal reasons, yesterday was a 5,000 calorie train wreck of a day. In fact, after weeks of pretty decent consistency, the whole week has looked like a Dow Jones graph.

I scarfed down a half a bag of Tostitos, a pair of chocolate croissants, a tube of cookies, a chocolate bar, a half a batch of homemade meringues, and almost an entire packet of Triple Chip Tollhouse cookie dough.

I find it fascinating.

I’ve described before how my average day used to be a 10,000 calorie day. It’s a marvel to me now I didn’t explode like Violet in Wiilie Wonka at some point.

I compared yesterday to one of my “old” days and find it was actually comparatively “low” cal, since it didn’t also include a fast food meal or two, a bag or two of a Geneva cookies, the requisite entire box of Entemann’s chocolate covered donuts, and a party sack of M&Ms. I honestly think 10k was a conservative estimate of those days.

This whole weight loss thing still amazes me. There is soooo much left to learn, it’s so easy to “fall off the wagon”, the rationalization games I can still play with myself, the foods that still occasionally seduce me. Sometimes, it can be something of an out of body experience sitting back and watching the hand fork the forbidden fruit into the mouth-hole. The right brain says “a moment on the lips” at the same time the left brain is saying “damn! This is good! What else isn’t nailed down?”

My diary closure warned “If you continue eating this much”, I could put on 24 pounds in five weeks.

It’s all simply math, but it’s not simple, is it? People aren’t abacuses (abaci?). We are humans and full of faults, flaws and foibles.

So what to do now? I’m no longer the 10,000 calorie girl I once was. I’m not going to say’,”Oh,see? I can’t do this!” and fall back into bad habits. But mercy, it IS always going to be a battle, isn’t it?

Making a batch of 60 carefully prepared 7.5-calorie meringues is an exercise in futility if you’re going to eat most the batch in one sitting.

Oh well, time to tighten up on the weighing and the discipline again. I am not here to pile the weight back on.

Replies

  • cmriverside
    cmriverside Posts: 34,458 Member
    yeah. I mean, no. It's not simple.

    But it is about forgiving, moving on, and knowing it will happen again. There *may* be some planetary alignment or something though. I blew past my calories by 3PM yesterday and didn't let that stop me from continuing on to eat even more! Damage = 1068 past my goal. :lol:

    It happens.

    It will be fine.
  • sunny_d22
    sunny_d22 Posts: 316 Member
    Thanks for sharing this. I liked how you recognized it so much less than your old 10,000 calorie days. I'm sure you'll move on and get back on your track and I'm sure it will happen again. I know that I will always have some higher higher calorie days throughout my life and that's going to be okay as long as it doesn't become my regular habit.
  • BarbaraHelen2013
    BarbaraHelen2013 Posts: 1,941 Member
    cmriverside wrote: »
    yeah. I mean, no. It's not simple.

    But it is about forgiving, moving on, and knowing it will happen again. There *may* be some planetary alignment or something though. I blew past my calories by 3PM yesterday and didn't let that stop me from continuing on to eat even more! Damage = 1068 past my goal. :lol:

    It happens.

    It will be fine.

    You might be onto something there! I ate a bunch of stuff yesterday, too! Things I wouldn’t normally even think of stuffing in my face. To my shame, I didn’t log it at all, but I know it was a lot - including a stupid amount of peanut brittle 😱, almost an entire bag of wine gums and several glasses of red wine (the first of which I did log 😇😂.

    Don’t have a clue why, I wasn’t hungry, I was no more stressed than normal, no explanation!

    Scale was up 2lbs this morning 🙄 but I’m back to normal today, not tempted to continue. Just a crazy day! 🤷‍♀️
  • BarbaraHelen2013
    BarbaraHelen2013 Posts: 1,941 Member
    Can’t edit, but did want to add - no idea about body temp - but, my resting heart rate had been steadily climbing all week, from 62 up to 77!

    That’s rapidly dropping now though, almost back to normal. 🤷‍♀️ Is it relevant? No idea, but it’s something I’ll look out for in future.
  • PAPYRUS3
    PAPYRUS3 Posts: 13,259 Member
    IDK....maybe it was a full moon last night cause I decided it would be a grand idea (well...there was no actual thought process involved in this 'decision'...) to get into the granola bars and eat two of those - dates and prunes/rice crackers and some pb2. Sounds 'healthy' enough....but still managed an extra 500 calories that I sure didn't need right before bed🙄
  • AnnPT77
    AnnPT77 Posts: 35,252 Member
    Man, I feel like I missed out on some kind of collective cosmic event! Despite being an indulge-y style calorie banker, I ate within my (banking) goal yesterday. :neutral:
    BarbaraHelen2013 wrote: »
    Can’t edit, but did want to add - no idea about body temp - but, my resting heart rate had been steadily climbing all week, from 62 up to 77!

    That’s rapidly dropping now though, almost back to normal. 🤷‍♀️ Is it relevant? No idea, but it’s something I’ll look out for in future.

    My resting heart rate is pretty much always up a few beats after a big-eating (over maintenance calories) day, like from low-mid 50s to somewhere in 60s, then slowly down on subsequent days.

    I can't say I routinely notice a difference in energy level, but sometimes those things can be subtle. I do know that I rarely see as big a long-term gain from a *rare* (RARE!) super-indulge-y day as the raw number of calories would suggest (some gain, perhaps; but not as much as the numbers would suggest). It's that "few hundred over maintenance, quite a few days" thing that's the real scale-killer, in my experience.
  • heybales
    heybales Posts: 18,842 Member
    Most people see the HR effect when going into the diet, going down.
    But going up does indeed happen when eating over.
  • BarbaraHelen2013
    BarbaraHelen2013 Posts: 1,941 Member
    heybales wrote: »
    Most people see the HR effect when going into the diet, going down.
    But going up does indeed happen when eating over.

    Totally agree, but this was different. Heart rate had been climbing for over a week, but the ‘splurge’ happened only yesterday. Normally, I associate climbing HR with onset of some sort of minor illness. Maybe I was subconsciously fearing Covid and was insidiously stressed after all? Hmmm. 🤔
  • richardgavel
    richardgavel Posts: 1,001 Member
    Just curious, which of those did you enjoy the most? For me, probably would have been the cookie dough 😉
  • springlering62
    springlering62 Posts: 9,046 Member
    For some oddball reason I had the idea of running my salt grinder over the cookies before I baked the blocks that managed to survive the first blitz. OMG. That took them up about ten notches. I have to say, that was pure, joyous gluttony and I would not hesitate to do it again- in a few months.

    Was really just musing about it all, but I appreciate everyone else’s honesty about a bad day. Just strange it hit us all at once!

    I started back at the barbell gym a couple of weeks ago and have just been peckish, even though I increased my calories back to pre-covid at the same time. And there’s extended family stuff looming that’s all going to get dumped on my shoulders. It has briefly reared it’s head. *sigh*

    Am back in good form today. Even had to add a giant bowl of buttered popcorn to get close to goal. (I didn’t want a big day followed by a low day. I figure that would just exascerbate the yo-yo pattern I’ve been in this week.)
  • Diatonic12
    Diatonic12 Posts: 32,344 Member
    I'm wondering if there's a connection with the body transformation changes you described 5 days ago. I really liked that description because I have felt the same things.
  • age_is_just_a_number
    age_is_just_a_number Posts: 653 Member
    Simple not easy.
    One day is not going to put you on a new path. We all have the odd 5000 calorie day.
    This is a lifestyle journey and you just drove over a bumpy patch in the road. Now, it is in the past and you are looking forward.
  • Hanibanani2020
    Hanibanani2020 Posts: 523 Member
    It always am astounded how little a huge amount of calories can actually be when it comes to volume of food.
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