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Week Two Recap

Jul 27th, 2009
by James.
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The second week has been punched in the mouth and is now lying whimpering and bruised across the curb. Let’s talk about how it went.

Sekrit Plan - Week 2

Fitness Benchmarks

As I mentioned at the beginning of the week, I was going to add some real world fitness benchmarks to the moon numbers that Wii Fit and Wii Sports hand out in the form of “ages”. This appears to be a success. I’ve seen improvement in push ups, crunches, and squats. Hopefully week over week I’ll become stronger in each of these areas.

I’ve also found that my resting heart rate seems to be a bit lower overall (by 3 bpm). This could be due to normal fluctuation, so I’ll be keeping an eye on it next week as well. Ideally it will trend downward.

Body fat percentage by calipers is the same. I really don’t know if I’m doing it right or not. But I haven’t seen major changes on the scale either, so I guess I’ll just have to keep at it and hope that I see some change as the weeks go by.

Wii Fit

I did succeed in doing 15 – 45 minutes of Wii Fit each day. I also tracked my heart rate on most days to get a sense of which activities were providing the most aerobic exercise. The activities I found most strenuous were:

  • Push Ups & Side Plank
  • Lunges
  • Plank
  • Island Run – Long

I wasn’t able to do the jackknife properly, so I didn’t list it on here. It is quite strenuous, but since I can’t do it right I don’t think I’d get much benefit from it.

EA Sports Active

I only played EA Sports Active for a short time. I had hoped to play more, but didn’t get to it. I found it more difficult than I would have expected to just jump into an activity. You need to create a workout playlist to do so, and the interface isn’t super intuitive. I would have preferred it if there was a menu like Wii Fit that let you just jump in and out of activities, even if it didn’t have the same level of tracking. I will probably come back to the 30 Day Challenge at some point since it includes pre-defined workouts.

Punch Out

Punch Out with motion control is fun to play. Though it can be frustrating going from the NES style to motion control + balance board. You sacrifice some precision for a more visceral experience and a decent level of activity. I only played one day this week, but this is a game that I could see rotating in once and a while for an alternative to Wii Fit and Wii Sports boxing activities.

Simple Calorie Counting Made Complicated

Jul 19th, 2009
by James.
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With all the complicated diet plans and confusing hoopla out there, you’d think that weight gain and weight loss were mysterious forces beyond human comprehension. It turns out that it’s actually kind of simple.

Miss Hannigan knew that bathtub gin was surprisingly low in calories

Miss Hannigan knew that bathtub gin was surprisingly low in calories

Food is full of calories. Some calories come from fat, some come from sugar, some come from protein, but in the end they’re all used for energy. When your body takes in energy it’s only got two basic choices. It can burn it up for fuel, or store it for later as fat. So the equation is pretty simple – if you take in more energy than you burn up, you’ll pack on fat. If you burn up more energy than you take in, you’ll lose fat.

When you start down the rat hole of weight loss advice, it’s easy to lose sight of the simple truth behind all of it: If you want to lose fat you need to burn more calories than you eat.

So with that in mind, I went online to find out how many calories I actually need to eat in a day. If you google around for daily caloric needs, you’ll find a lot of different options. The sites all seem to use slightly different formulas to arrive at your daily calorie needs, but they all tend to arrive in the same general ballpark. Most of the calculators use your gender, age, height, and current weight to come up with a basal metabolic rate. This is the basic rate that an average person like you would burn up calories if you were at rest all day. Most of the calculators will also ask for your activity level. Active people need to take in more calories than sedentary people.

After getting about 10 results the average for me – assuming a sedentary lifestyle -  is:

2256.43 Calories Per Day

That’s the number of calories I would need to take in to maintain my current weight, provided I’m not burning many calories from exercise.

A bit more investigation turned up this interesting tidbit:

3,500 Calories = 1 lb. of Fat

That means in order to lose a pound of fat in a week, you would need to burn or cut out 500 calories per day either through diet or exercise. On the flip side, eating an extra 500 calories per day would pack on a pound of fat in a week’s time. I find this really helpful to know, since 500 is a pretty easy number to keep in your head when making food choices.

So what does this mean for the Miniimize Me project? Well, my high weight at the start was 177.5 lbs. My goal weight is 149.58. And I’ve got about 83 days left. Let’s see what that works out to…

High Weight of: 177.7 pounds (minus)
Goal Weight of: 149.58 pounds (equals)
28.12 pounds left to lose – which is the same as (times 3,500)
98,420 Calories of fat to be lost over (divided by)
83 days remaining (equals)
1,185.78 Calories Per Day or (times 7)
8,300.48 Calories Per Week which is (divided by 3,500)

I need to lose about 2.37 Pounds Per Week

From what I’ve read so far, 2.37 pounds per week is a little high. Most sites recommend losing one to two pounds per week. If you take the calorie deficit that I’d need to run per day (1,177.35) and subtract it from the number of calories that I need to maintain my basic metabolic rate (2256.43) you end up with the low low figure of 1,079.08 calories per day. That seems low enough that it could trigger a starvation response and actually make weight loss more difficult.

Instead of shooting for 1,079 total calories per day, I’m going to shoot for around 1500 calories combined with exercise and see how things are trending. After a couple of weeks if it looks like I’m not going to be able to reach my goal at that pace I may have to consider cutting back on calories while still getting enough nutrition to support exercising.

Obviously there’s more to the story of weight loss and weight gain, nutrition, and health, than a simple equation between calories in and calories out. But I think that sometimes when you’re neck-deep in contradictory and conflicting information about weight loss, nutrition, and health it’s useful to step back to the basics and see that you are what you eat.

(If you’d like to see some of the concepts in this post illustrated with stick figures – and explained a bit more clearly – check out this site)