Let me tell you the most frustrating thing about progress. We often don’t see it, and when we don’t get the results we want immediately, we quit. I’ve done it, probably hundreds of times. Progress is really hard to visualize in the moment. We step on the scale and see a bigger number than the one we saw yesterday, or finish a run we thought felt good and saw the time was slower than the last. The truth is, those metrics are just snapshots. Moments in time giving you a very small piece of information that when excluded from the entire data set is nearly useless.

A lot of runners don’t care about their top speed at mile 4 during the race, they are way more interested in the average pace over the duration of the event. As a cyclist, there are very few times when I care about a single data point during a ride. One exception to this, and my mother might freak out, is the top speed during a mountain decent. But in reality, that number doesn’t really give me any benefit to my health. I didn’t get to 50mph on a bike because I pedaled at 1000watts, I got there because the road was steep and I had a nice tail wind to push me down the hill. I’ve only hit that speed on a bike a handful of times, and none of them were due to any amount of effort. The effort came with the climb to the top of the mountain at a slow 8-10mph average.

So if a single snapshot doesn’t really give us a clear picture, why bother measuring things like weight? I would suggest that we have an equilibrium that contains several different factors outside of just diet and exercise. We have would I would call a “Net Zero”, the minimum viable operating state where we consume calories and burn them at a consistent daily level. Some people will see this as a “plateau”; the point when they aren’t gaining or losing any weight.

In 2021 I was training for Ride the Rockies, a 6 day cycling event that would take me and my buddies all over southwest Colorado through Durango, Cortez, Norwood, Ridgeway, and back over the Million Dollar Highway. My training regimen was about 100+ miles a week on the bike in hopes to build enough stamina to stay in the saddle for that 428 mile event. I went into the year thinking that the increase in training would surely trigger some weight loss, but I stayed at the same weight for the entire year. I wasn’t consciously logging my diet, and my sleep was still garbage, but I thought for sure I’d lose some weight.

I got myself into a similar cycle that a lot of people get themselves into; “I rode 100 miles this week, I can justify this meal”. Before you know it, every workout is a justification for a “cheat meal”, then the next workout is a punishment for overeating. See the cycle? Sound familiar?

I hated logging my food. Not because I was scared to see what I ate, but because the amount of effort it took to count calories and find similar foods in the app I used that would closely match what I ate. I use My Fitness Pal to log calories for each meal. It isn’t the easiest tool to use, but they have a large database of available foods that make it somewhat painless to do. Logging food is just another data point that contributes to that snapshot. I won’t get into the specifics of which foods to eat. I’m not going to pretend to be a dietician, but I hope the takeaway from this is just to get some visibility into what you consume. This is just another tool in your arsenal to help you understand what factors are contributing to your progress.

I take the shotgun approach to logging calories. I don’t carry around a food scale and weigh my tacos. I simply break down the ingredients and estimate as best as possible. Is this going to give me a 100% accurate reading? No. But this isn’t a math test, and close enough counts. You can worry about the specifics of your consumption later. Just start by getting into the practice of understanding what you eat. This will pay dividends in the long run when you start to make choices on your meals simply because you know how much they cost in calories.

The simple approach to net zero is this: Measure you calories consumed daily, subtract the calories you burn both with exercise and just with your daily routine, and account for your water consumption. Tracking calorie burn can be fairly simple. I keep tabs on my calories through my Garmin watch. Knowing how many calories I burn while sitting at my desk is just as important as those I burn during workouts. It is all about visibility. Give yourself more data so that frustrating number on the scale, or slower pace can start to make more sense. These are just a few factors to consider, there are a lot more data points I’ll dive into in later posts.

Happy Tuesday! Go do some push-ups.