Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Day 3.248: Exercise fail - calorie fail

I had planned to go swimming this morning for the second time this week, but I had a lousy night's sleep and in the end was not sufficiently close to being ready to make it happen. No matter, I'm still on course for my normal target of going twice this week to do 50 lengths (approx 30 mins swimming) - but the chances of making three visits are now rather slim.

Unfortunately to compound the problem I was at P.F. Chang's for dinner tonight with a colleague visiting from California. We had a good meal and talked shop unashamedly. Thanks to the recent change to the law, I was able to make my choice from the menu with the knowledge of the calorie content - everything was fairly shocking, but it could have been worse without the information.

I've been tracking my calorie intake and exercise using an app on my phone and I dutifully entered my dinner once I got home. When I called it up, the main dish registered as '1 serving: 272 calories' and the rice added a further 190 calories. Sounds good, but I knew thanks to Albany County that it should have been a number in the 800's.

I assumed that the app had a fault in their data, so I logged onto the restaurant's website, found the nutritional information table and scrolled down - sure enough there was 283 calories (a little more than the app thought, but comparable).  I scrolled back up to check the column was really the correct one and applied to a full serving - yes it did.

I was confused, but reassured until something caused me to scan the rest of the columns in the table - and there it was: 'servings per dish'.  Sure enough, the dish I had had contained three servings - I'm sure three people share that dish all the time.  Not.

So score 1 for Albany County for forcing this place to print accurate information on their menu, and -1 for P.F. Chang's for their attempt to pull the wool over the eyes of people who attempt to find nutritional information via their directly-provided data.

In the end I'm calorie-neutral for the day and planning a swim tomorrow, but first, hopefully, a decent night's sleep.

3 comments:

  1. Have you signed up for your PF Chang's Warrior Card yet? Sounds exciting ;-)

    A

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  2. Good to hear that the App which you were using almost gave you the accurate amount of calories intake.

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  3. Thanks A - it does indeed, but I am not a regular at such places!

    Fitness Freak - well, the app gave me the information in keeping with the website, which was itself rather misleading as it was difficult to tell that a 'serving' was 5 oz and an order/bowl contained three of them (it was impossible to tell from the information supplied by the app). However, I'm squarely blaming P.F. Chang's for this one.

    ReplyDelete

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