Unfortunately I sit in front of a computer all day too. Yet get hungry way too often. Blah.

I’m again trying to shed fat, although it’s difficult as I suspect I fall somewhere inbetween the endo- and mesomorph body type. I can build muscle like nobody’s business, but losing fat is extremely difficult. If I cut calories severely (which I tried for many months in 2007, eating around 1200 cals a day while exercising twice a day), I’ll lose muscle and hold onto fat. I am a metabolic freak of sorts.

But I’m hoping that since I’m running relatively low mileage coupled with boatloads of intensity (and making sure I get adequate recovery, which I didn’t last year), my body will respond to the new demands and get on board with the fat loss.

Since this is the year in which I am doing everything differently, my approach to weight loss is to:
1. Track every damned thing I eat (in an iPod app called Tap and Track) and don’t go over the calories allotted for the day.
2. Stop weighing myself. Whether I was up, down or the same, the number on the scale affected my behavior in a counterproductive way — and often affected my mood for the entire day.
3. Eat little “meals” every 1.5-2 hours. I get hungry that often even if I eat normal sized regular meals. So breakfast, lunch and dinner portions are now half what I used to eat.
4. Get on the wagon. I’m allowed two beers a week — and I have to allot for them in my calorie counting. That’s it. I buy really nice beer so I can enjoy them.

I’ll weigh myself sometime in September, probably. If I haven’t lost significant fat by then I’ll go see a sports nutritionist. (Tracking everything is a somewhat defensive move, so that when nutritionist doesn’t believe that I don’t eat garbage or high calorie foods, I can give him or her the complete record.) In the meantime, my clothes are getting looser, so I think it’s working.

Good luck.

Also, those fat measurement devices are junk. At your current level, you can see if you’re losing body fat anyway.

Also, thanks for the Houston Hopefuls shoutout.

One thing I did note (that I liked when I re-listened today) was when you are running, you have a sense of how your body feels with regards to weight. If you “feel” the extra weight, you might want to look at losing some.