BFL Week 4 Update

Gained half a pound this week...I sure hope it's muscle! That puts my weight at the end of week four at 200 lbs. I did some research on average daily nutrition intake and this is what I figured out for an approximate day:

• Calorie intake: 1700 - that's 85% of the USDA recommended 2000
• Fat intake: 37.6 grams - that's 56% of the USDA recommended 67 grams
• Carb intake: 225.9 grams - that's 78% of the USDA recommended 289 grams
• Protein intake: 152.3 grams - that's 305% of the USDA recommended 50 grams

So you can see, this diet is attempting to replace a lot of the normal fat and carb calories with protein instead, which should be building lots of muscle given that we're lifting weights three times each week.

Something I was wondering about is how fiber factors into all of this. Of those ~ 230 grams of daily carbs we're intaking, around 38.5 of them are grams of fiber. But US nutrition labels don't include calories from fiber in their total calorie totals. However other countries, like Canada, do. So by Canadian standards, our total calorie count should be 154 calories higher. The argument for not including these calories is that we don't actually digest fiber. But that seems to apply only to insoluble fiber. We do apparently digest soluble fiber like that found in fruits and vegetables.

On the exercise side of things, my legs took a beating this week! We had two days of lower body lifting, three days of aerobics on the stationary bike and two nights of TKD. My legs were screaming for a break by the weekend. And in class, I was having a hard time keeping strong stances because my muscles just felt so weak. I also played softball on Wednesday and wasn't feeling at my best, a bit sluggish with all the crouching and standing but just running felt pretty good.