Naia Peanut is in the 3rd percentile for weight. She is quite wee, it's true. But not unhealthily so. We are just a small people, us Homie Bears. Well, my dad's pretty big but he's the anomaly of our family, I think. A couple of years ago, I was edging up to the 200lb mark, and trying mightily to surpass it. Being 140lbs all through high school and university, hitting 200lbs was a big deal to me. Since I was a casual runner and worked out some, I figured the extra weight was all muscle, baby. Michelle tactfully informed me otherwise. So then I started running a little farther, and hitting the weights a little harder, and pretty much overnight I dropped down to my current weight which is in the 173-178 lb range, which includes, if I may be so immodest, some respectably cut muscles. Not bad for 37 years old.

I think I can mostly thank my genetic legacy and body type more than any iron discipline on my part- you should see what I eat at work. And at home...

Anyways I bring it up because I just  read The Cure for Everything! which was written by a local U of A guy, Timothy Caulfield. Pretty good book, just trying to debunk all the myths and misinformation out there about fitness and healthy living. That, and AJ Jacobs' Drop Dead Healthy have been my literary nutrition of the last few days. The messages are pretty similar and pretty simple- the only truly surefire way to lose weight and live healthily is to eat right and get lots of exercise. Easy, but hard.
I do have one question, though. Here's the thing- a guy like me, probably only supposed to eat around 2200-2400 calories a day, give or take, that may even be a little generous. For a completely sedentary person, less. I don't know if I've ever eaten that little. Doing the math a bit, I wonder how it is that I'm not way fatter? I don't run that much, and indeed, Caulfield asserts that, for all the many many benefits of exercise, weight loss just isn't one of them.
One possible answer, appropriate enough given the title of this blog: poo.
I'm not being funny or trying toilet humour, I'm serious. No one ever talks about the calories lost to poo. I guarantee you our bodies are not 100% efficient at sucking every single calorie out of the food we eat. So how much of the devastatingly bad food choices we make every single day wind up getting flushed out of us unabsorbed? Probably varies, and I'm not trying to provide another excuse for terrible eating, but it's gotta be some right? I know- I'll ask google.
Hmm, Google doesn't really know, or at least, I don't really feel like wading through all the internetz garbage such a search turned up.
Best guess: some.