Lately, I've noticed my weight gradually climbing and hovering about 15 pounds higher than I would like it to be. That's a lot of extra baggage to be hauling around on a marathon. I finally took up an offer from my gym re: a nutrition consultation.
By and large, I'm doing mostly the correct things. Looking at my general diet, I eat pretty healthily. But a couple of tweaks stood out as items that might need changing. First, I need to up my carbs (add rice, pasta, bread) so that I'm more reliably at 45-50% calories from carbs, and up the amount of protein I'm eating during the day (so that I'm more reliably close to 30-35% protein). I also don't eat enough veggies, since some of the things I (stereotypically) think of as veggies really are fruits: tomatoes and peppers. Adding in rice will help, as will bring carrots back in. Slowly but surely, I'll figure out what else might be reasonable. And from what he said, it sounds like I just might not be eating enough overall (though I'm not TOO far below where I should be).
Possibly a more major factor in my incremental weight gain is stress. On a scale of 1-10, I said that during the workday I'd place myself at about a 7. I barrel through the stress throughout the day, pretty much running on adrenaline the whole time. (And it's a sedentary computer-based job, for crying out loud!) Plus my workdays often drift past 9 hours (not counting my 45+ minute commute each way), leaving me very little in the way of time when I finally get home to decompress.
Come Monday, I need to talk with my boss about how I can manage to get out much closer to the 8-hour mark, since the stress is certainly taking its toll on me. With the extra 1-2 (or more) hours back, I will be able to take on some additional relaxing techniques at home and, ideally, work things out so that I can actually get to sleep early enough that will allow for 7+ hours per night, instead of the 5-6 that I currently get on worknights.
We'll see what progress I can make in hopefully short order.
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