The Bar Code Diet

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Tags

beer wine and spirits, Daily Burn Food Scanner, Guinness, Moab Half Marathon, wine of the month club, WSJ

The new year has gone off like a gun shot. Work is in full sprint with 12 hour days, lunch at my desk, and leaving little time for running. But I’m catching up on my fitness regimen. I got in 3 days in a row over the weekend. And I started situps and light weights. I feel my tone returning. More importantly I believe I’ve established some diet discipline to counter the re-emergence of my belly over the holidays. I’m limiting myself to only a single beer per day.

This is not to say I only drink a single alcoholic beverage per day. I’m not insane. I’m starting with some beer discipline and will expand into wine if warranted. I will say not all beer, wine and spirits are the same in terms of calories. I know this because I’ve started to scan the bar codes on bottles for their calories with my food scanner iPhone app. Many beers are probably not as bad as you think. A Guinness is only 126 calories. And yet my scan of bar codes on several spirits showed that many and more for a glass of whiskey or gin. Certainly more once you add tonic or other fillers. Don’t think you’re sparing calories simply because you avoid beer.

I haven’t actually scanned my wines. This is because I receive my vino in monthly cases as part of the WSJ wine-of-the-month club and those bottles don’t come with bar codes. Or QR codes which are the more graphical equivalents like you see on the tomato in the picture above. That one translates to “organic” in case you are interested. From what I know, every type of alcoholic beverage adds up to roughly 100 calories. Light beers might be less but most other drinks are perhaps closer to 125 calories. Let’s not even talk about a frozen rita.

Point is that at 49 I have to both diet and workout if I hope to lose any weight. I gained 10 lbs. at the end of 2011 and need to be back down to 180 for the Moab Half Marathon in March. Which is totally doable, but not by simply wishing it. I think I’m on track. I feel like the discipline is in place now and it’s just a matter of time before I start seeing results.

A Runner’s Christmas

26 Monday Dec 2011

Posted by Ed Mahoney in Running

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Tags

angel gets its wings, Daily Burn Food Scanner, Lady Bird Johnson, plantar fasciitus, Sierra Nevada Celebration, Steve Collier, Town Lake

At the risk of sounding materialistic, I totally got what I wanted for Christmas. Chad gave me a running shirt, hat and gloves. The shirt is Under Armour Heat Gear, but it’s thicker material than my other two. It doesn’t list the content but feels like a cotton/polyester blend. I could wear this as a first layer on cold runs – probably when wearing only two shirts rather than three. I should also mention the shirt is bright orange – not outside the color spectrum of Denver Bronco orange. I did suggest bright colors in my earlier blog. The gloves are in between the thicknesses I already have. This gives me a total of four pairs of gloves now. And the hat is definitely thick and heavy, but not fleece. It’s less form fitting so I’ll have an air pocket between my head and the top of the hat which should keep me warm.

I’ve yet to wear any of my new gear. I ran Christmas Day with Brit down on Lady Bird Johnson Lake in a cold, light rain. This was several hours before receiving the new gear. I still like to call this trail by its original name – Town Lake. My old loop appears to have become a giant dog run. I saw maybe a half dozen runners without a dog. Of the two or three dozen runners with dogs, most had between two and four dogs running alongside them. Despite the signs posted every few feet reminding humans to scoop the poop, no one did. And nearly half the dogs were off leash despite the on-leash signs. That’s the Austin I remember – where laws are merely suggestions. City ordinances are more like guidelines.

The sky cleared today but it doesn’t look like I’ll run. Too much to do. I was invited by some of my college buddies to run on Christmas Eve but at 6am in the rain. I’ve said this before – I’m a gentleman runner. That’s a fair weather, never before noon kind of runner. I hope to get back down to Town Lake one more time before heading home. It’s amazing how little time I have for myself while on holiday. But it’s all about family and I’m enjoying myself. I got another cool gift – a pair of orthopedic house slippers designed to correct pronation. Just what I need. My plantar fasciitus still hurts like the devil and I’m hoping that a move to fully orthopedic footwear will aid my recovery. Something has to give, I’m gaining significant holiday weight and need to be able to increase my mileage.

I’ve heard for every mile run, an angel gets its wings. More importantly, a 180 pound runner burns 130 calories. I bought myself a 99¢ iPhone food scanner app by daily burn for Christmas. It tells you the calories and other nutritional information of foods by scanning the bar code with your iPhone camera. You don’t have to actually take a picture – it’s extremely quick and easy. My brother-in-law Steve turned me on to it. Steve also advised me to drink this Sierra Nevada Celebration Pale Ale which scans in at 214 calories. Dammit, that’s a big beer. But tasty too. Cheers!