Moving targets: predicting weight loss by calories burned

As I mentioned the other day, last week I lost three pounds.  Since I’ve been obsessionally faithful in logging nearly every morsel into my CalorieKing software, I can report that I ate an average of 250 calories a day LESS than the software recommended.  Here’s the way that worked (warning: math follows):

• On a day when I would have no exercise, the software recommends that I should eat about 1850 calories in order to lose about a pound a week.  What I actually at on average, then, would have been about 1600 calories a day (assuming no exercise).
• On days when I did exercise (which happened to be every day last week, though the Sunday workout was just a half-hour stroll through the woods), I entered the exercise done and the time I spent on it, and the software provided an estimated amount of calories burned in the workout. (I average about 650 calories per workout, combining weights and elliptical.)  In those cases, the software ADDS those calories back to my 1850 cal allowance for the day.  So instead of an 1850 cal limit, I actually am able to eat an additional 650 calories on days I work out, for a total of 2500 calories.

In short, last week I averaged 2500-250, or 2250 calories eaten per day.  Which, given my exercise, was enough to lose three pounds.

Now, here’s the problem with this data:  It doesn’t really account for the amount of weight lost very well. Why?  Well, let’s do the math (okay, more math):

Shaping your food preferences for weight loss

Recently, more experts seem to be saying that exercise alone is seldom effective in helping a person to lose a lot of weight.  Rather, exercise has to work along with attention to one’s diet.  Whether you believe in the high-protein/fat/veggie and low carb diets (like Adkins), or some more traditional “food pyramid” with more grains and less fat, the main thing in weight loss is to take in a reasonably nutritious diet that is not too high in calories or unhealthy things like saturated fats or cyanide.

If you track your eating on a daily basis and are pretty accurate about doing so, you can actually be fairly clear day-to-day about how many calories you are ingesting.  Many food guides and both online and computer-based software (such as CalorieKing, the software I use) will make this process even easier than the old fashioned methods involving looking up what you’ve eaten in a paperback guide and then writing it down and guesstimating your portion size (“hmm… and then I added some butter… was it a teaspoonful or…?”)  In fact, a simple combination of a well-stocked collection of measuring cups and spoons, software that is easy and fast to use and that gives you all the nutritional info you need on what you’ve eaten, and the religious habit of measuring and recording everything that goes into your mouth, can give you considerable control over your caloric intake.

At which point, you start to learn some necessary, but painful lessons.  The main one is that many of your favorite foods may pack quite a caloric wallop.  For instance, even though you did a 30 minute treadmill, that pint of Ben & Jerry’s totally overwhelmed your day’s allotment of both calories and fat.  Even perfectly “innocent” and “healthy” foods (like that pint of Chinese take-out) may give you six-, seven- or even nine-hundred calories — a huge amount when your software helpfully informs you that “an average woman of your height can expect to lose a pound a week if you consume no more than 1200 calories a day…”

This is another of those dilemmas that are hard to solve if you rely only on the diet-exercise combo. The “diet” approach traditionally relied on a sort of half-imaginary superpower called “willpower,” which thin people seem to have and you don’t.  And as we’ve discussed, exercise alone never works because it is so easy to eat double whatever number of calories you’ve run off in the gym.  (A handful of Oreos can compensate for any length treadmill workout.)

What you may need to do is to retrain your psychological food regulation system.  This can be done several ways:

A weight-loss tool kit – food tracking

As I mentioned in an earlier post, at the highest level (what the business writers often call the “30,000 foot level”), I think it makes sense to assume that a weight loss program has to consist of three components: exercise, diet, but also a set of effective psychological strategies — attitudes and skills that help you stay on track during what is absolutely guaranteed to be a highly frustrating and slow process.  In some upcoming posts, I plan to share some of my own favorite psychological strategies, as well as some favorite guides to mastering the mental game that you might enjoy.  But I don’t want to drift off into a discussion of weight-loss psychology without also tending some other fires first. In particular, I want to talk about diet, particularly how you can track what you eat, and why it’s important to do so.

When I look back at my own earlier, often marginally successful efforts, I realize that my most common mistake was generally to assume that if I was doing vast-seeming amounts of exercise, I was guaranteed to lose weight.  The problem was that it is so easy to eat way more calories than you burn at the gym, that I generally would become a fit fat guy.  I could spar at the martial arts dojang and break boards with my hands or feet, or I could enjoy a forty mile Saturday bike ride, but then I’d stop at Dairy Queen or eat a few large meals and all the work would be for naught, weight-wise.

In short, it was ultimately important for me to find some way to track and manage my caloric “input.”