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Viewing by Month: January 2010 / Main
January 22, 2010
The horrible conundrum of calories-out versus calories-in
One of the common misconceptions is that if you exercise hard enough and often enough, you can eat anything you want. Unless you are Michael Phelps, little could be farther from the truth. The reason for this is it's much harder to burn calories-out than it is for you to accumulate calories-in.
Here is an example of what I mean by that.
If you ate 8 Samoa's Girl Scout Cookies (my personal favorite - in my heyday of over-consumption it wasn't unheard of to nuke a box of Samoa's at one sitting), that amounts to 600 calories. You could likely accomplish eating those (8) cookies in about 5 minutes or less.
If you ran 4.56 miles (like I did this morning), that would amount to 608 calories. To burn the same amount of calories as I could consume in 5 minutes, I had to run for 41 minutes.
See where I'm going with this?
I pulled down the workout data (not all-inclusive) I've entered into MapMyRun since late April 2009:
Total Workouts: 71
Run: 34
Sports / Activities: 37
Total Distance: 195.08 mi.
Total Burned: 35,075 (kcal)
Sounds like a lot doesn't it? Almost 200 miles and just over 35,000 calories. Wow, I should be able to eat everything in sight without guilt, right?
Not so fast. Do a couple of simple calculations and you'll see the calories-out versus calories-in problem.
35,000 calories = 10 pounds of body weight = 468 Samoa's (29.25 boxes, or just over 2 boxes per month)
1 mile run = 180 calories (approximate)
1 Samoa = 75 calories = .42 miles
It isn't to hard to imagine someone eating 1-2 cookies a day on average (maybe not all Samoa's) for a year, is it? In order to offset that "small" amount, you'd have to run/jog/walk 195 miles a year in order to not gain the 10 pounds from the cookies.
Scary, isn't it?
My point isn't to scare you, or bring hopelessness to the hopeful, it is to point out the imbalanced relationship of diet and exercise as they relate to maintaining a healthy weight.
If all you care about is losing weight, or not gaining weight, it is far easier to do so with calorie control than it is to do with exercise alone. If you care about fitness in addition to weight management, your exercise rewards will be greatly amplified by making a healthy diet with calorie control as a cornerstone of your program.
For me, the simplest way is to eat 3 smaller (healthy) meals a day, and 3 100-200 calorie (healthy) snacks, which makes me less likely to have hunger drive me to poor diet choices.
To effectively manage your weight, you need to plan your meals as much as humanly possible. When you can't plan, take a moment calculate how much effort in calorie-out will be required to balance your calorie-in decision. If you aren't willing to make the effort to balance the two, skip the calories-in, or pick something healthier. Pretty simple.
Here is an example of what I mean by that.
If you ate 8 Samoa's Girl Scout Cookies (my personal favorite - in my heyday of over-consumption it wasn't unheard of to nuke a box of Samoa's at one sitting), that amounts to 600 calories. You could likely accomplish eating those (8) cookies in about 5 minutes or less.
If you ran 4.56 miles (like I did this morning), that would amount to 608 calories. To burn the same amount of calories as I could consume in 5 minutes, I had to run for 41 minutes.
See where I'm going with this?
I pulled down the workout data (not all-inclusive) I've entered into MapMyRun since late April 2009:
Total Workouts: 71
Run: 34
Sports / Activities: 37
Total Distance: 195.08 mi.
Total Burned: 35,075 (kcal)
Sounds like a lot doesn't it? Almost 200 miles and just over 35,000 calories. Wow, I should be able to eat everything in sight without guilt, right?
Not so fast. Do a couple of simple calculations and you'll see the calories-out versus calories-in problem.
35,000 calories = 10 pounds of body weight = 468 Samoa's (29.25 boxes, or just over 2 boxes per month)
1 mile run = 180 calories (approximate)
1 Samoa = 75 calories = .42 miles
It isn't to hard to imagine someone eating 1-2 cookies a day on average (maybe not all Samoa's) for a year, is it? In order to offset that "small" amount, you'd have to run/jog/walk 195 miles a year in order to not gain the 10 pounds from the cookies.
Scary, isn't it?
My point isn't to scare you, or bring hopelessness to the hopeful, it is to point out the imbalanced relationship of diet and exercise as they relate to maintaining a healthy weight.
If all you care about is losing weight, or not gaining weight, it is far easier to do so with calorie control than it is to do with exercise alone. If you care about fitness in addition to weight management, your exercise rewards will be greatly amplified by making a healthy diet with calorie control as a cornerstone of your program.
For me, the simplest way is to eat 3 smaller (healthy) meals a day, and 3 100-200 calorie (healthy) snacks, which makes me less likely to have hunger drive me to poor diet choices.
To effectively manage your weight, you need to plan your meals as much as humanly possible. When you can't plan, take a moment calculate how much effort in calorie-out will be required to balance your calorie-in decision. If you aren't willing to make the effort to balance the two, skip the calories-in, or pick something healthier. Pretty simple.
