Diet Math or Why I'm Not Upset That I Was Up This Morning

Yesterday would have been my 7th gym and/or practice day in row and I was totally game to go despite being sore everywhere. However, I'm baking a cake for 100 people due Saturday and needed to make a trip to the cake supply and grocery store. Then, I had a board meeting in the city. On top of all of that I need to bake brownies for Saturday's bout and get up super early to skate in the parade. Whew.

In light of the fact that I didn't have practice and I wasn't going to the gym, I figured it was ok if I was pretty light on the eating and would actually help me. I drank a ton of water and by the time I left at 6 o'clock for my meeting, had only eaten around 1000 calories. I left myself this ~400 calorie leeway because we have our meetings at a little pizza place and I wasn't sure if I would be hungry or not.

Fast forward and I didn't eat at the pizza place, but indulged in a few spoonfuls of cake batter and nibbles of extra cake. Since I didn't really know how to track this little cake spree, I just wrote off most of my remaining calories for the day.

This morning when I woke up, I was up around 2 lbs. Once upon a time ago, I would have flipped out and said 'f*ck this diet', but here is why I didn't:

My daily calories goal is 1400
Until 6pm I only ate 1000 calories and drank a ton of water
While I was baking, I ate (what I thought was) about 400 calories

First, it takes 3500 calories to gain one pound (and I "gained" 2). I'm fairly confident in my pre-cake calorie counting, but according to MFP, one Betty Crocker - French Vanilla Cupcake with no frosting is 120 calories. I would have had to eat about 30 cupcakes worth of cake mix just to reach 3500 calories, plus additional cupcakes to cover the deficit that is already included in my calories goal. The chances that this happened are slim to none.

So what did happen? Well I have two hypotheses. The first is that I've been a really crappy water drinker for the last two weeks (with the exception of practices and even then not so great) and yesterday I drank the hell out of some water. The second goes back to not eating enough. After considering how much cake batter/pieces I might have ate, I would say that it was no more than a cupcake and a half (approx 180 calories) and only put me at about 1180 for the day which put my body went into freakout mode again. Who knows, maybe it was a little of both. Either way, it is impossible that this is real weight.

I wrote this post because I know it can be so easy to get discouraged when the scale does not show all the effort you've been putting into losing weight and sometimes it's nice to see things in black or white. Weight loss is a numbers game so if you get discouraged, make sure you really look at your calories and habits to figure out what's going on. Listen to your body!