Yesterday was a non-fasting day, yet I still lost 1.5 pounds. I wanted to see what would happen if I simply limited my calorie intake without being too concerned with what and when I ate. The original plan was to have the usual salad for dinner minus the chicken but with nuts and seeds added for protein, so I picked up some almonds, cashews, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds at Whole Foods. I intended to stop at HEB (giant Texas grocery store) on the way back to my house for the necessary produce, but my brain was preoccupied with something else and I completely forgot about that part of my morning excursion until I got home.

I didn’t have any desire to get back into traffic (the traffic on the street going to and from my house is horrendous), so I decided that I’d just eat nuts, seeds, and an apple or two for my daily sustenance. But at work I had an idea: maybe I could squeeze in a double cheeseburger from P. Terry’s (Austin burger joint) and still maintain a calorie deficit for the day. I’d already had a few handfuls of the nuts, and nuts are not a low-calorie food, but I was pretty sure that I hadn’t gone too overboard. Also, I was just curious if I could manage a bit of weight loss even while indulging in a meal that wasn’t a good choice for someone on a diet.

Ground beef is high in fat and calories (as is cheese), and the bun for a burger is high in carbohydrates which break down easily in the digestive tract and spike blood glucose levels. In a nutshell: eating a double cheeseburger is not consistent with minding calorie intake. However, I was craving something other than a salad (which I couldn’t have made anyway due to forgetting to stop at HEB), and I knew it would fill me up. I did skip the fries, though, which would have dramatically increased not only the caloric intake but the carbohydrate intake, and doing so probably kept me under my basal metabolic rate.

So, you can eat food that’s not particularly good for you and still lose weight as long as you’re careful. However, making the consumption of cheeseburgers a regular thing isn’t particularly wise given that red meat causes inflammation and is linked to cardiovascular disease (not to mention that grilled red meat is linked to some forms of cancer: https://tinyurl.com/5c79jzxd). Still, it was a worthwhile experiment and I’ll probably do it again before returning to more reasonable fare.