Slaughterhouse 30 Excerpt - "You've Got Right Now"

NOTE: Part of a longer chapter on measurement tools.
WORD COUNT: 610 words

Numbers Are King

“No, we don’t want to think. We want to know.” – Marcellus Wallace, “Pulp Fiction”

The equation for losing weight, like I explained before, is very simple. You need to expend more calories than you take in. This will burn the fat your body has stored for just such a situation, and you will lose weight.

In order to do this correctly, you don’t want to spend a lot of time guessing about what you did each day, or what you ate each day. If you’re going to make this a goal you can accomplish, you can’t guess. You have to know.

Here are some ways to know the answers to these questions:

CalorieKing

I’ve used this software for three years and point it out to anyone who is looking to lose weight. With a food database of over 65,000 items, you enter a name, a serving size, and click on the meal that you had it with, and it shows up in a table and adds up all sorts of nutritional information. It helps you create a diet to achieve your goals and tells you what your calorie, fat, protein and carbohydrate targets should be to achieve it. Since it already tracks what you’re eating, you’ll see a bar graph at the bottom of the screen of how close you are to hitting, or exceeding the established targets.

There’s more.

It will also track how many calories you’ve burned through exercise. These calories will be subtracted from the calorie total that appears on the CalorieKing screen. Feel like going to the Cheesecake Factory tonight? A lot of their menu is in CalorieKing, so you can look beforehand how much work you’ve done today and what you can eat and still expect to lose weight or hold steady. They have everything from lawn mowing to skiing and multiple speeds of running and cycling, so as long as you have a watch and, in some cases, a way to measure the distance you’ve traveled, you’ll know what your calorie burn is.

Now, there will be days when you don’t meet CalorieKing’s thresholds. A successful day has two green check marks at the top of it – you were under your calorie budget and did more than 30 minutes of exercise in a day. But here’s the deal, and it’s right at the core of the program: if you spend a day where you don’t switch your diet or do some exercise, it’s foolish to think you’re going to lose any weight. And the way our program is set up, you know how important it is to do as much as you can TODAY to reach your goal. CalorieKing is a great visual tool that helps me see how I’m doing, and knowing how that data translates into results.

At my desk I have a quote from Dizzy Gillespie:

“If I lay off the horn for a day, I know it. If I lay off for two days, my peers know it. And if I lay off for three days, the whole world knows it.”

He was one of the greatest and most distinctive trumpeters of all time, and knew that he had to continuously work to get better. Lance Armstrong and Team Astana ride on off days in the Tour de France, even though there’s only three off days during a race that lasts 2100 miles. Eventually, the fitness program that you’ve undertaken, the one that made you swear at the alarm clock and hate this book’s author with the intensity of a thousand suns, will become routine. Your day will feel strange if you don’t work out. I promise.