 So I went on a date yesterday. We went to this place called Dobre Tea House in Burlington, Vermont, which is definitely worth checking out if you're ever in Burlington. But the reason I suggested we go out for tea instead of dinner, drinks, or ice cream or anything like that is because I'm cutting right now. I'm trying to lose those last three to four pounds to reach my goal and get down to 10% body fat. And it's just kind of a sprint to the finish right now and I have to cut out sugar, alcohol, dessert, pizza, you know, all the good stuff. Of course I didn't tell her that. I just said, hey, let's meet up for tea. Can you imagine how douchey that would have sounded? Yeah, I'm cutting right now. So like, why don't we just get some tea and then go back to your place? Anyway, so we meet up, we order our tea and then she sees it, the baklava. And if you don't have a passion for Mediterranean cuisine or you're just from a different planet and you've never heard of baklava, baklava is a pastry dessert consisting of delightfully flaky, buttery layered pastry filled with a soulwarming mixture of chopnuts and honey for an almost religious experience. Anyway, so she sees the baklava and of course she goes, oh my God, baklava, but she doesn't order it. She just orders her tea. She knows she wants the baklava. I know she wants the baklava. She knows that I know she wants the baklava and she knows that I know she wants me to order the baklava so that she can have it. Why women do this? I'll never understand, but I do know the rules. So I order my tea and can we please have the baklava too? Why am I telling you all this? Here's why. When people are trying to lose weight, they always think to themselves, I can't have that burger, I can't have that pizza, I definitely can't have that baklava. They think that eating these specific foods are gonna make them gain weight. I say, ah, wrong answer. That's not true. It's not the bad food, be it a burger, a dessert, ice cream, pizza, whatever by itself that's making people gain weight. It's that food in combination with a bunch of other food they already had that day. So my method for losing weight and getting lean is super simple. I track my calories. I use a Google Sheets spreadsheet to track every single thing that I eat. And I promise it's not nearly as hard as people think it is. It's actually really easy and it doesn't take that long to get used to. So based on my basal metabolic rate, what my goal is, how much weight I wanna lose per week and my activity level, I have a calorie allowance for each day. For me right now, that's about 1,900 calories. But it's only this low because I'm already pretty lean. And there just isn't really any wiggle room anymore. Like I said, it's a sprint to the finish. But when I started cutting weight, my allowance was like around 2,200 calories. And of course it would go up if I was really active for the day. But anyway, the point is one small piece of baklava has only like 300 calories in it. Yeah, it's processed sugar. Yeah, it's like simple carbohydrates and it's not great for you. But at the end of the day, it's 300 calories. So it's really just not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. If I had that all day every day, we'd have a problem. But just one piece of baklava is not gonna make a difference in my overall diet if I'm doing everything else right. And this is actually my report from that day that I'm talking about when I had the baklava and the ice cream and all that stuff. This is what I actually ate that whole day plus all my activity, tracked right here so you can see it. And as you can see, I obviously went way over my allowance that day. And it's okay, it's not the end of the world but of course, if it keeps happening, you're never gonna reach your goals. But that day, it definitely happened. So the point is, it wasn't the baklava that was the problem. And it also wasn't the entire pint of halo top ice cream I ate on my way home from the date because it didn't go very well and I was kind of depressed. It wasn't even the three cereal bars I ate that morning or really any of those things by themselves. It was the combination of all of that in the same day that made me go over my allowance. It was the fact that I had baklava and ice cream on the same day that I already had a bunch of high calorie foods like three cereal bars and Parmesan chips and some other stuff. So I guess the lesson here is if you're going out for dinner and you know that the place you're going has that pizza that you just love or that dessert that makes you feel like you've reached nirvana and everything's okay with the world just for that moment that you're eating it, you can have those things but try to plan ahead. Maybe skip breakfast or have a really light breakfast. Maybe skip lunch or have like a big salad with a bunch of vegetables but very light dressing and not a whole lot of toppings have that for lunch. Plan ahead. So that way when you go out for that dinner you still have a thousand 1500 maybe even 2000 calories left in your allowance and then you can basically have whatever you want and not feel bad about it. So it's not the baklava. Eat the baklava. You can have the baklava.