Cheesecake Anyone?

If you are one of my Facebook friends, you may have noticed that I was pondering what effect a trip to The Cheesecake Factory would have on my weight loss efforts on Saturday. You may have also noticed that Sunday was my birthday, so... after much deliberation (okay, not really that much) off we went in the spirit of celebration.

I did, however, attempt to be prepared. I ate a sensible breakfast of oatmeal, did a 60 minute kickboxing workout (the only butt that got kicked was mine), had some veggie soup and Kashi whole-grain crackers for lunch so I wouldn't be ravenous when I arrived, which I was anyway. But the real question is, since when does being hungry or not hungry have anything to do with eating cheesecake?

I order a chicken dish and as prescribed in one of the books I've been reading, ate only half and had the waiter box up the other half. I will consider this a Fit for Life triumph, but if you've ever seen the gargantuan portions at the Cheesecake Factory you'll know this was not extremely difficult. But chalk one up for me anyway! Now it's time for the dessert. I look at my husband and ask is he would like to split a piece. He looks at me as if I've lost my mind - this response may stem from a rather ugly incident several years ago involving a lemon torte and a fork stabbing. So...I'm on my own. I order the Dulce de Leche and it is fantastic. I savor every bite and figure I'll just deal with it tomorrow.

Tomorrow is here and I've gone to CalorieKing, the online food database, to assess the damage. The entree weighs in at 940 calories, but since I only ate half, I think that's pretty reasonable. One piece of Dulce de Leche cheesecake weighs in at an astounding 1010 calories! 74 grams of fat and 42 grams of saturated fat. That's 114% and 210% of the daily value respectively. It did have 200 mg of calcium which is twice the daily recommendation for a woman my age - so it's kinda healthy, right?

CalorieKing has some recommendations to burn these calories off, all I have to do is choose one of these activities:

280 minutes of walking - in case you don't want to do the math, that's 4 hours and 40 minutes
84 minutes of swimming - I'm pretty certain hypothermia would set in within 2
116 minutes of jogging - if I could jog for 116 minutes I probably wouldn't be in this position in the first place
154 minutes of cycling - at least I could be done before dark

Still, I have no regrets, birthdays come but once a year, and it was soooooo worth it for me. I read something this morning written by a man who lost 300 pounds (that's not a typo - 300) and he said one of his strategies was that after any kind of "cheat" meal he made sure that his next five meals were all really healthy. That sounds good to me, we're all gonna splurge or slip-up from time to time and this seems like a reasonable way to deal with that.

So..I'll be carefully planning my next five meals and in the words of Freddie Mercury, I'm gonna "get on my bike and ride"!

Tami