Trade Off

If you read my post from January 31, 2012, you know I'm currently tracking calories on an iPhone app called MyFitnessPal (www.myfitnesspal.com). Each day I log the calories I've taken in, list any exercise (which has been minimal, I'll admit), and see the results. I'm on a 2050 calorie per day plan so I can lose the excess weight I've gained in the last few years. My goal is to drop below that magic number I swore I'd never cross ... and then to hopefully maintain that new weight through the new eating habits I've learned in the process.

Yesterday as I was logging my dinner (spaghetti with meat, bread with butter, orange juice, and water), I noticed something interesting. Spaghetti in our house is loaded with calories.

We usually take some noodles from a box, boil them in water, add sauce from a jar, and some meat. As I input the ingredients into my iPhone app, they really started to add up. The total noodle calorie count was 1,200. The sauce added another 600 calories. The pound of hamburger was an additional 1,209 calories.

Divide the total calories by the number 6 (the total number of servings this meal made), and you eat 502 calories per serving ...

Now let's get to the trade off part ...

I'm not sure your thoughts on this, but 502 calories for a single serving of spaghetti seems like a lot to me. This really hit home when I started to compare it to some of the other goodness I've tracked during my nearly four weeks on this program.

For the same amount of calories in one serving of spaghetti, you could eat:

5/8 of a pound of BBQ beef
3 Hot, fresh out of the oven, homemade biscuits with peanut butter and jelly
10-1/2 ounces of Orange Leaf Cheesecake flavored frozen yogurt
2-1/4 cups of homemade banana pudding
2 full Twix candy bars (that's four individual Twix bars)
1-1/2 cups of Kroger Fun Munch Cookies-n-Cream ice cream
2-3/4 slices of Chocolate Bread
4 trail mix granola bars
8 donut holes
125 grapes

Now I don't know about you, but the options I just listed all sound much more enjoyable, and potentially more filling, than the single serving of spaghetti.

But alas, we all know you can't simply survive on junk food alone. You have to have balance in your diet, you need protein, carbs, natural sugars, and even a touch of salt. All of this can be found in the spaghetti. Not all of it can be found in the optional list I provided.

In the end, I obviously ate the spaghetti. I even had a double portion; which then shot me way over my daily allowable calorie limit. But I ate the spaghetti, the slice of bread, and drank my water and juice.

Today, however, I wondered exactly what options I could have traded; and made the list. Sometimes we do have to stop and take a look at what we could have had, what we could have done, where we could have ended up. Even if that looking is showing us some place we didn't want to be, someplace we would not be enjoying, someplace we are better off having avoided.

It is through retrospect, through taking a short timeout, that we truly understand how far we've come, how much we've achieved, how good our life truly has become. And if, in taking that moment, we realize we chose poorly, we took the wrong road, we ended up where we should never have come; we can adjust our trajectory and return to the proper path.

Each day we face a trade off. Each day decisions result in moving one direction or another. If you never stop to evaluate, how will you ever know if you made the right decision?