Cincinnati and my 1000 calorie lunch!

Cincinnati is prettier than I thought it would be. Or at least the suburb of Liberty Township is. It’s quiet. Like I’m out in the country. Houses are big. Yards are bigger. When you come from a place where houses are stacked up one on top of the other you forget that not every place is like that. Yesterday is sort of a blur to me. I didn’t hardly sleep on the plane. I gave up my window seat to the woman that was sharing a row with me. She asked nicely and I’m a sucker for politeness. It’s hard to sleep when sitting in the upright position and a stranger sitting next to you. It’s one thing to be able to sprawl all over your traveling partner but when you are traveling alone the last thing you want to do is invade someone else’s very limited space.

I did manage to squeeze in a short nap after being up for 30+ hours.

Short is the operative word.

I finally got to test out my Polar FT4 hrm after the short nap. I strapped up and hit the treadmill / elliptical. 71 minutes later I was told that I burned 597 kcals. It’s the first accurate reading I’ve had since starting this LCJ and I’m not surprised to find that up until now my kcal counts have been off. I’ve been relying on the machines/calorie king database / crappy Target hrm. It was lower than I had anticipated, but I think thats pretty common.  The FT4 will help me nail down my calorie in —-> calories out over the course of the next couple of weeks and get an even better grasp on food intake.

Speaking of which, I consumed a 1000 calorie lunch at this place called Skyline Chili. It was incredible and frightening all in the same forkful. My friend told me you can’t get this stuff anywhere else (thank goodness!) and I had to try the restaurant or else it wouldn’t be a real Cincinnati vacation. I should have gotten pictures when the food was put before me but it was so overwhelming that I could only think of one thing: HELP. I did manage to find some pictures online so you can get some idea of what I’m talking about.

This is called the “3 way” You can get this in three different sizes (s, m, and shit your pants large). I got the regular. You can also order this as a skyline (“I’ll take a regular 3-way skyline”) and that means it comes with 50% more cheese on it. I KNOW RIGHT???!!!  Everyone I was with ordered this dish as a skyline. I didn’t cause the picture on the menu scared me with all the cheese. It came to me looking pretty much like the picture here. I immediately removed half the cheese and gave it to someone else. So in a sense they had a 3-way with a skyline and a half. Who would have thought, cheese, chili and spaghetti noodles would taste so good together…it did. They also serve this dish as a 4-way (diced onions OR red beans) and as a 5-way (diced onions AND red beans). I would have been happy with just this for lunch but since I’ve never been there I just ordered what my friend ordered so in addition to the cheesychilipasta goodness I got these…

I KNOW RIGHT???? Okay but first off let me just say I got these WITHOUT CHEESE. They are like little mini hotdogs a.k.a “Coneys” (two probably equate to one regular hotdog). I can’t believe the amount of cheese that comes on practically every item on their menu. The guy who took our order sort of gave me the hairy eye when I asked for mine to come sans cheese. It was probably his first clue I was from out of town. In the end I ate 3/4 of the 3-way and one full Coney and the hotdog out of the other. I came home and luckily CalorieKing had these delicious little nuggets of cheesychilipastahotdoggy goodness in their database. Calculate, calculate, calculate and the total was 1000 calories.

*Gulp*

I hit my friends mini gym for an hour today to help work off some of the calories and give me a little wiggle room in case I got hungry later in the evening (which I did). At the end of the day I came out under my calorie count, a gallon of water down, a great work out and some delicious food only found in Cincinnati.

A great day to be on vacation!