BRIENMALONE's CalorieKing blog
Saturday, Feb 2 2008 - Learned Another Lesson Today
View BRIENMALONE's food & exercise for this day
Soooo... Looks like my Polar watch "calories burned" is a little too generous. I kind of suspected this, but after this past week, there is no question.
If you look back at the past few weeks, you'll see my net calories ticking along perfectly like a heartbeat. Three low days at 1850 calories and one high day at 2500. The only thing I varied was the number of times and intensity of my workouts.
More Exercise = Less Weight Loss??? I Don't Think So
Looking at the chart, the FEWER times I worked out and the fewer calories I burned, the more weight I lost. This isn't the way the body works! The only way this could happen is if my Polar watch thought I was burning more calories than I really am.
According to my watch, I burned 4,100 calories this week and lost 0.3 lbs of fat. The week before, 2200 calories and I lost about a pound. If the watch is wrong and telling me I burned more than I did, then I was overeating every day I exercised. Especially on my high calorie day. I guess I should count myself lucky that I didn't gain any weight this week!
So... What To Do??
I hope that there is some way to tune the watch so it does a better job! I think it has a setting to calculate VO2 max through a fitness test - maybe that will help. I hate to think that the elliptical machine would do a better job of counting calories than my nice new watch!
Elliptical
So I hunted around for an exercise calculator to see what the 'estimates' are... and they blew me away. Some of the estimators out there simply took my weight and told me how many calories I would burn. The consesus was about 940 calories an hour - which is ridiculous... I usually go about 45 minutes which would be 705 calories. Then I struck gold...
Calories Per Hour.com
http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php
This site has the exact model that I use (Precor EFX 546) and calculates based on body weight, strides, level and other factors. According to this calculator at 235 lbs, 45 minutes, level 15 and 100 strides per minute, I should burn about 600 calories. At 120 strides per minute, 673 calories.
I have to wonder if this is the calculation done by the elliptical machine.
BodyBuilding.com Calories Burned
This site is great - you tell it what you want to burn and how long and it will suggest activities
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/calories.htm
More later...
[9:00pm]
Forgot what this was like... CRAVINGS
This is the weirdest, most annoying thing. This is supposed to be a high calorie day - which usually leaves me feeling spun up... but I'm sitting in bed right now with the WORST simple carb craving. Holy cow. It started earlier today... Out of nowhere I wanted pizza... or a blizzard... I just gave Tony a big pep talk about a blizzard craving and I'm starting to wonder if he broke out a voodoo doll and made me feel his pain *laugh*
I cracked my natural foods diet a bit by having a 160 calorie pack of mini-oreos... which was good at the time, but, much to my surprise, I was out of calories right at dinner tonight. In fact, I had to make a choice between chicken or a glass of milk as part of my dinner. (Chicken made the numbers work better.)
I went downstairs a few minutes ago to get some medicine for my wife (family is sick again) and raided some 3 month old cookies and fudge. I took one small bite of a cookie and one small bite of fudge, but mustered the willpower to spit it out. (Well okay - it wasn't tough... the cookie was stale and the fudge rock hard). I have worked so hard to bring my diet to where it is right now, I don't want to blow it. If I add a cheat food in to my plan - great... but I can't spontaneously eat... period.
Wow. I'm really not sure if I can go to sleep like this. I guess I can try. I think I need to stick to eating my first meal at 8am or later... this is miserable! I'm trying to focus on how good breakfast will taste in the morning after my morning treadmill. I think I'll try to do my fitness test in the morning.
PS - I need to reweigh and recheck body fat in the morning. I forgot that I did my measurements after my early morning meal!
If you look back at the past few weeks, you'll see my net calories ticking along perfectly like a heartbeat. Three low days at 1850 calories and one high day at 2500. The only thing I varied was the number of times and intensity of my workouts.
More Exercise = Less Weight Loss??? I Don't Think So
Looking at the chart, the FEWER times I worked out and the fewer calories I burned, the more weight I lost. This isn't the way the body works! The only way this could happen is if my Polar watch thought I was burning more calories than I really am.
According to my watch, I burned 4,100 calories this week and lost 0.3 lbs of fat. The week before, 2200 calories and I lost about a pound. If the watch is wrong and telling me I burned more than I did, then I was overeating every day I exercised. Especially on my high calorie day. I guess I should count myself lucky that I didn't gain any weight this week!
So... What To Do??
I hope that there is some way to tune the watch so it does a better job! I think it has a setting to calculate VO2 max through a fitness test - maybe that will help. I hate to think that the elliptical machine would do a better job of counting calories than my nice new watch!
Elliptical
So I hunted around for an exercise calculator to see what the 'estimates' are... and they blew me away. Some of the estimators out there simply took my weight and told me how many calories I would burn. The consesus was about 940 calories an hour - which is ridiculous... I usually go about 45 minutes which would be 705 calories. Then I struck gold...
Calories Per Hour.com
http://www.caloriesperhour.com/index_burn.php
This site has the exact model that I use (Precor EFX 546) and calculates based on body weight, strides, level and other factors. According to this calculator at 235 lbs, 45 minutes, level 15 and 100 strides per minute, I should burn about 600 calories. At 120 strides per minute, 673 calories.
I have to wonder if this is the calculation done by the elliptical machine.
BodyBuilding.com Calories Burned
This site is great - you tell it what you want to burn and how long and it will suggest activities
http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/calories.htm
More later...
[9:00pm]
Forgot what this was like... CRAVINGS
This is the weirdest, most annoying thing. This is supposed to be a high calorie day - which usually leaves me feeling spun up... but I'm sitting in bed right now with the WORST simple carb craving. Holy cow. It started earlier today... Out of nowhere I wanted pizza... or a blizzard... I just gave Tony a big pep talk about a blizzard craving and I'm starting to wonder if he broke out a voodoo doll and made me feel his pain *laugh*
I cracked my natural foods diet a bit by having a 160 calorie pack of mini-oreos... which was good at the time, but, much to my surprise, I was out of calories right at dinner tonight. In fact, I had to make a choice between chicken or a glass of milk as part of my dinner. (Chicken made the numbers work better.)
I went downstairs a few minutes ago to get some medicine for my wife (family is sick again) and raided some 3 month old cookies and fudge. I took one small bite of a cookie and one small bite of fudge, but mustered the willpower to spit it out. (Well okay - it wasn't tough... the cookie was stale and the fudge rock hard). I have worked so hard to bring my diet to where it is right now, I don't want to blow it. If I add a cheat food in to my plan - great... but I can't spontaneously eat... period.
Wow. I'm really not sure if I can go to sleep like this. I guess I can try. I think I need to stick to eating my first meal at 8am or later... this is miserable! I'm trying to focus on how good breakfast will taste in the morning after my morning treadmill. I think I'll try to do my fitness test in the morning.
PS - I need to reweigh and recheck body fat in the morning. I forgot that I did my measurements after my early morning meal!
3 comments so far.
3.
a decade ago
Thanks for the Bodybuilding web link. I've made PDFs of the exercise charts by calories burned and by exercise name for 10-minutes. This way I just move the decimal point to get the burn for one minute so I can set up custom exercises in my CK destop diary. I already knew about the caloriesperhour site and have used it quite a few times.
by SHADEAU
2.
a decade ago
LOL! Whew. Good to know you don't have some black magic working over there
;). Actually, I'm not looking for a straight line loss - I made a post about 3 weeks ago (maybe more) about how the numbers don't (and won't) add up exacly... but I need the gauge for 'calories burned' to err on the side of reporting too few rather than too many because I use that figure to calculate how much I need to eat in a day. If it reports to many calories burned, I'll eat too much to compensate... too few, and risk under eating, but for weight loss a little under eating is okay. Thanks for the support!
by BRIENMALONE
1.
a decade ago
sometimes our words come back to haunt us. i should never have used the "B" word on this website. sorry about that, and no voodoo was ever involved! i appreciated what you said, and it helped. i wonder if you give the body too much credit for being logical, Brien. math seems to be a big part of your plan, but i'm not sure the body knows math. it seems that you're looking for a straight line loss, and it never seems to work that way. don't be disappointed by the .3 loss. it's a loss. heed your own advice..work the plan! results will take care of themselves. and thanks for all your help!
by TLO