Caloric intake overload!

Meet the new "F*ck You Pizza":



13,740 calories?!? Woah. Just... woah... (Yes, I know that it's a joke.)

Just to give people an understanding of what that means for someone like myself (6'3", 245lbs male, 35 years old), according to this site, even if I exercise daily and I have a physical job, I would "only" need to eat 4055 calories/day to maintain my weight. (Now, if I were training for the Olympics, then perhaps eating like Michael Phelps would be a good way to go, though.)



While I wasn't anything like Michael Phelps when I was swimming competitively in high school, I did pound the calories - and lost weight - every day. I remember that I would eat a box of cereal for breakfast, a whole pizza for lunch (in addition to a bagged lunch of two peanut butter sandwiches and an apple), a giant pretzel for an after school/pre-swimming snack, and half a casserole for dinner (leaving the other half for my parents). It caught up to me in my first year at university: I was able to eat a lot, I had been eating a lot, but now I wasn't doing much physical exercise... and my "freshman 15" was in kilos, not pounds.

When I was doing aikido training at Nippon-Kan in Denver, CO, I was also eating a lot of food every day, following several hours of training. My breakfasts were back up to a whole box of cereal (although never sugary cereal), and my dinners were usually a large helping of something from the adjoining restaurant. This second time, though, I was a bit smarter about caloric intake when I stopped the intense training, and I worked at lowering my intake to what seemed like mere bird-peckings.

I now find myself with the ability to eat fast and to eat a lot. It's something that helps me when I do fieldwork - eat a LOT of carbs in the morning, and then do a full day of hard work - but it's something that has made me into a person who always feels like I can eat more. Indeed, I rarely feel fully full. It's why buffets are so dangerous for me. It's why leftovers are so dangerous for me. I can eat in one sitting more than some of my friends comfortably eat in two meals, and still keep going.

That's one of the reasons why I am so happy that I can bike while on this trip to Toronto. Keeping my basal metabolism going while on vacation is very important for making sure that my body doesn't slow down any more than age and work will do to it. Biking allows me to be more mobile than walking and nowhere near as sweaty, while also allowing me to have a great workout. (And Toronto is - no matter what I had thought about Ann Arbor - a fun city to cycle in; at least the places that I've been.)