Clueless Calories

Basic Nutrition

I woke up with one killer headache. I may have overdone it on the 4000m swim the night before. I spent the morning with my eyes half shut because they were still red and irritated from the chlorine. I didn't think to use eyedrops in the morning, I should make a habit of it though.
One of the nice things of working in an office with a mall below is that you can always make a quick trip to the pharmacy! I grabbed some much needed hydration and advil. Actually I didn't get advil, I got the no-name stuff for several buck cheaper. I don't know what the difference is but according to the ingredients it looks like the exact same thing, except for the fancy label and marketing costs. I have been meaning to try our the G2 gatorade with 0 Calories. I took a look at the label to see that it actually did have calories,  about 20. Not a big deal, but my goal was to replenish the electrolyes without the carbs and 'energy' part of the drink. They had Powerade Zero which really didn't have any calories, nor did it have any sugars whereas the G2 had 5 grams. The ingredients looks fine, except for something called Sucrose which sounds too much like artificial sweetener. Sure enough when I got back to my desk I looked it up and confirmed that suspicion. I don't think it was all that bad, since it is made from actually Sugar rather than an oil product. Now I might not be making sense here, I don't know very much about nutrition and ingredients.
To my knowledge I follow the general outlines of HFCS/Glucose/Fructose is bad ingredients. We get more than enough in a regular diet so avoid overdosing on it. Extremely difficult I might add but I make a concious decision to avoid it as much as possible.  Artificial sweeteners while no calories is bad bad bad. I am under the impression it's actually an Oil based product. As is Dairy Queen icecream apparently? Soft icecream is not even Milk? I don't know where I heard that one but I'd like to avoid that kind of garbage. Even though it tastest soo good. Of course the tried and true Deep-Fried is bad for you. Self explanatory.

So as I said, I have only a few rules to my diet and clearly I don't know what I am talking about. I don't buy into the Omega-69-B4-Electrialis-Marketing-Buzz-Word-Of-The-Week commercials. If you eat a somewhat balanced diet, you shouldn't need to 'tune-up' the digesting system with crap. Again, do as I say, not as I do. lol ;)

Soooo back to my headache. Having the mall is also a bad thing. It means it is waaay to easy to pop downstairs for a quick snack. Of course there is no such thing as a healthy snack to be found so it's always chips or chocolate bar or something. I've made friends with the Deli owner downstairs and he has apples and bannanas and a whole variety of salads. A lifesaver, albeit expensive snacks lol.

So last night's run was gorgeous. My headache never went fully away but I wasn't about to skip my run, especially after last weekend's fiasco. It was such a beautiful and warm night out (-5 Celsius) that I didn't even put on a mid-mid-layer. My original plan was to duck out of work early to go scope out a new route that included some trail while it was still kind-of-light outside. Unfortunately this plan got interrupted by a surprise. I was presented with a non-xmas-related gift from the company in light of 'all my hard work'.
I just picture Adena spitting coffee all over her monitor after reading that statement. For Brian's case, it was probably scotch. Despite appearances, I guess the more than couple hundred hours of overtime went noticed. I do work hard, especially since alot of maintenance and downtime must be done at 'odd' hours of the night to minimize interruption of 24/7 operations. K, enough bullshit for one post - back to regularly schedule programming:

So anyhow, back to ducking out of work early - it just wasn't going to happen so I'll make a note of trying the new route on Thursday instead. Since the weather was so nice, I added in an extra Km side track with a big uphill. Even before the uphill I was getting some awkward tension in the top front of my leg near my hip. I couldn't figure out how to stretch it out, it almost felt like a cramp but more like a fatigued soreness. I haven't felt this before. I wonder if the time on the bike is effecting my run? Or maybe I was pushing too hard. Either way, I hope it goes away. Incase it's inflamation I've been downing the 'advil'. A little extra advil never hurt anyone... I think. Wait, I feel my headache coming back.

It was a long day after getting up at 5:30am to get a Trainer ride in. I hit the sack at 9pm and wish I had went sooner. I was passing out I was so tired.