Walking the hills for weight loss

I’m visiting out-of-town relatives over the weekend, in some hilly, sidewalk-deprived suburb of Connecticut.  This means having to find some other way to maintain my exercise program, and having to adapt to different food choices and routines.   Getting away and seeing folks I like is nice, but if I don’t want to have a traumatic “weigh-in day” experience on Wednesday, it’s important to not undo in a long weekend visit all the things I’ve been working for all week.

Since I generally take one rest day a week, I took yesterday off from any kind of workout.  But that meant that today was exercise day.  Being a few hundreds of miles from my gym, I had to improvise.  I decided to go out and walk the hills.

I’ve always loved walking — being outside in the fresh air, seeing the rolling hills or the woods or the ocean or the sights of a different city have always given me a lot of joy.  And walking generally feels good to do — I find running hard on my knees.

My concern has been that walking is sometimes a rather “lite” exercise in terms of the calories one burns.  While a runner can burn as many as thirty or more calories a minute, the burn rate for walking may be much slower — as little as five calories a minute, according to my reference information.  Meaning that I may get much less bang for my buck, calorie wise, strolling around than I do back home on the elliptical.

The key seems to be pace.  Faster means more calories expended.

I put on the monitor and a pair of too-worn running shoes (they work fine in the gym, where my feet are fairly still in the treads of my elliptical machine), and hit the hills.  After a couple of minutes of slower, warm-up walking, I did jog for about a minute, until my heart rate was in the top of my so-called training zone (somewhere from the mid-120s to the low 140s.)  Then I just adapted my walking pace as best I could to keep it mostly there.  It went sometimes much higher on hills (into the 150s or a bit more), but that’s still a reasonably comfortable pace for me for brief periods and from my own calculations is a good zone for me to go into for briefer periods of higher-intensity work.

It was a great walk.  I got blistered a bit on one heel, but otherwise no harm done.  Got a great cardiac workout and my legs appreciated a nice rest with a novel after 55 minutes up and down the hills.  Perfect day for it.

Being outdoors puts you in a less predictable exercise situation than working out in a gym.  It’s kind of like switching from weight training machines to free weights — it may be better for you, but you also have much more variability in terrain, conditions, and even safety issues to cope with.  While many days, and in cold or snowy weather, I prefer the comfort of an indoor workout, there is still a part of me that seems to call me out of doors, even if it’s wet or cold or nobody in Connecticut seems to have considered the possibility that someday, someone might appreciate the chance to get out of their car and take a walk on a sidewalk.

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):

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.”