How You Can Eat 3000 Calories a Day and Maintain Your Weight

As an old retired guy, I often envy John’s adventures in hotels, at trade shows, etc., trying to find worthwhile food and a place to get in a workout. I think they make great blog items because they show how you need to be alert to your options to maintain your weight despite myriad obstacles.

For that reason, I thought it might be helpful to go through one of my days for you. I don’t have exciting trips and hugely diverse menus to choose from. I pretty much determine everything I am going to consume and how I plan to burn it off. For the past year I have maintained my weight between 150 and 155 lbs. This is 10 to 15 lbs under where I was when we started writing the blog, 20 lbs under where I was when John first introduced me to the Lose It! app and about 25 to 35 lbs under my average weight for the 30 years preceding this period. So, I know what it is to live with a weight problem.

You can maintain your weight and still consume big meals and snacks

As I have said here previously, I feel in total control of my weight and it is a direct result of the information in this blog. If you pay attention to your consumption, especially portion size, you can do it, too. And, you need to integrate some form of exercise into your life on a regular basis not just for weight control, but to maintain your physical and mental health.

Last Friday, September 16, I started with my normal breakfast of my smoothie, a cup of coffee and a hard-boiled egg. That’s a total of 585 calories for breakfast.

After walking the dog, I changed into my cycling outfit and took the dog for a 19 mile bike ride. This burned 804 calories. On the ride, I ate half a Fruit Smoothie PowerBar (110 calories).

I came home, took a shower and ate half of a quarter of a watermelon (56 calories). This is my regular ‘refresher, re-hydrator’ after biking.

For lunch I had my Kashi High Fiber Parfait, and a half slice of pizza from the Italian bakery.

I took the dog for a walk and fixed myself some cut up chicken breast in chicken broth with a cup of brown rice over it. See blog item The World’s Thinnest Soup. I use brown rice instead of barley in the latest iteration of that recipe. Total calorie count for lunch 840.

I took the dog out for another bike ride after lunch. We went 17 miles and burned 635 calories. I had half a Peanut Butter PowerBar (120 calories). After I got home and showered, I had another 1/8 of a watermelon (56 calories).

For dinner I had 1-1/8 servings of pasta topped with Newman’s Organic Marinara sauce. I used ground Romano cheese on the pasta. Dessert consisted of apple pie and a glass of soymilk. Dinner came to 870 calories.

I cooled out the rest of the evening watching a lecture on meteorology from the Great Courses and then some TV. In the several hours before bed I had the following snacks: Pepitas, (28 grams) 125 calories; Salted Kettle Chips (28 grams) 150 calories, an ice cream sandwich 140 calories and a 1.46 ounce Hershey with Almonds 210 calories.

Limit the size of your snacks and take your time eating them. Never put the bag of chips on your lap and start snacking, measure out what you will eat, close up the bag and put it away. As you can see from this recounting, you can have a variety of snacks if you pay attention to your portion sizes even if you don’t ride over 30 miles on your bike. Both the pepitas and kettle chips are very high calorie snacks. It is easy to run over 500 calories if you don’t pay attention to portion sizes.

I was able to enjoy a good selection of snacks with this kind of calorie burn. The first page of the blog says that we are two regular guys who like to eat. You can make it work for you, too.

Tony