Last week, I participated in a 5 hour marathon meeting session at work. A co-worker was kind enough to make a teriyaki run for lunch and bring us all back chicken teriyaki plates so we could continue our meeting unabated.

I ate my chicken teriyaki plate, then went back to our planning activities as intended. However, I noticed that there was one unopened chicken teriyaki plate still sitting on the table near me. I whispered to a few people, asking whose it was, and finally I got a consenus "go ahead, it's an extra, it's all yours." Trying casually to avoid the pig label, I just picked at it once in awhile, never taking more than a bite. As the meeting wrapped up, I opened the foam container all the way to finish the plate...only to find that it was 95% empty. In the last few hours of the meeting, I'd consumed an entire extra plate.

So I quickly took stock. I reflected for a few minutes, trying to figure out how I just consumed twice the amount of food I normally do, 1. without really noticing and 2. without portion-control alarms going off in my head (and stomach).

First of all, I've heard that people with gastric bypass surgery can often condition themselves to eat similar amounts of food, like before their surgery, if they learn to eat small bites over long periods of time. I now understand what they're talking about, in a very visceral way. Secondly, and more importantly, I realized I had justified the eating because of my bike commute.

I (sub)conciously kept telling myself - I rode 10 miles this morning and I've got a little over 10 miles to ride on the way back tonight (different route), so what the heck, how much harm can another bite do?

Well, being that I work around engineers, I looked at the problem from a mathematical perspective. Simple addition and subtraction. According to my Garmin, I burn somewhere near 650 (give or take 10) calories each way on the commute, for a total of around 1300 calories a day when I ride in. That number has given me a subconscious justification for eating anything put in front of me. On the opposite side of the ledger, I did a quick search for the average calorie count of a teriyaki plate. I found 3 different restaurants that listed the count and they ranged from 640 to 680. I'll assume my plate was 650 for the sake of symmetry. The implications were obvious - the extra plate wiped out all the calorie gains from one leg of a 20 mile bike commute.

As I've stated earlier, my goal in bike commuting is not weight loss. However, the mental impact of burning so many extra calories is that I can somehow "afford" to eat more - which to a certain extent is true. In fact, ingesting a few more calories is necessary for my long term endurance and general health when I'm burning 1300 more a day than I used to. The danger is that without conscious effort, I can actually work backwards without ever realizing it. Let's go back to that double-teriyaki-plate day.

In the morning after riding in, I had a Nature Valley Oats'n Honey granola bar (360 calories), a Kashi Peanut Butter granola bar (140 calories), an orange juice (160 calories) and water (0 calories, phew!) 660 calories (greater than the first leg of the commute) BEFORE I ate my big lunch. In other words, by the time I was done with lunch, I'd wiped out THE ENTIRE ROUND TRIP RIDE for the day.

Now that I'm conscious of what happened, I am going to be a lot more deliberate about my intake - much like the commute itself, it'll take planning and probably a bit more work, but it is clearly an area where I need to apply more effort if I am going to see optimal health gains from riding into work. Every day, another lesson.