iTunes Now Playing: Nightwish - Romanticide
So yesterday or more accurately on Sunday I was looking at myself in the mirror (actually my shirtless friends dancing with me) and decided I really really had to do something about my expanding gut.
So armed with the following piece of data:
Q. How many calories make 1 pound of weight?
About 3,500 calories adds up to about 1 pound. This applies whether they are food calories coming in, or calories (burned by exercise) going out.
If you eat 3,500 calories more than your body needs, you will put on about 1 pound. If you use up 3,500 calories more than you eat, you will lose about 1 pound in weight.
... I decided to start a fairly (no pun intended) aggressive weight loss routine. I have not been exercising consistently since I returned to school for my MBA five years ago and I continue to injure myself when I return too aggressively (damn addiction to exercise). So I decided Sunday night that I would try to burn 2000 calories per day in exercise. Without regard to calorie intake my first goal was to simply increase the amount of daily calories burned in exercise. Later will come resistance training to build muscle mass which in turn will increase the basal metabolic rate as well as better food and drink in-take controls (currently I am trying to cut large meals in half - stupid restaurant proportions, and snack intelligently).
No program success is really possible without taking some base measurements to track progress. So I depressed myself today and got on my scale 163.4#/74.1kg and 15.8% body fat via bioelectric impedance analysis (BIA). I use the Tanita BF682W set to athlete mode to more accurately meet the special monitoring needs of physically fit users. I’m 45 years old so at 15.8% I’m in the healthy category.
Finally, the real tell tale, for aesthetic reasons is the tape measure. I use a tailor’s tape so I avoid Internet inches. Today I was a whopping 35”/88.9cm. OUCH!! Not aesthetically pleasing at all! I have an image of the disgrace, but I think I need to update MacJournal in order to post it. (Note: Updated to MacJournal 5.1 and violà [look there-French] images).
So, on Monday I got on my road bike and road the American River Parkway from my home to Sunrise Access and back, 31-miles and 1447 calories (according to my Polar F11 Heart Rate Monitor (HRM). Then last night I joined FrontRunners/FrontWalkers Sacramento for a 10K run that according to my Nike+ iPod burned an additional 749 calories. A pretty effective first day since I also managed to control my eating. Now to keep this up for two weeks and see how big a difference in my waistline/waste line this makes. :-)
The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a statistical measurement which compares a person's weight and height. Though it does not actually measure the percentage of body fat, it is a useful tool to estimate a healthy body weight based on how tall a person is (Wikipedia-BMI). There is a Body Mass Index (BMI) calculator at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDCP) and a cool picture version at National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) site.
BMI Categories:
- Underweight = <18.5
- Normal weight = 18.5-24.9
- Overweight = 25-29.9
- Obesity = BMI of 30 or greater
