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):

Diet control and the measuring “cops”

A few years ago a local TV station ran an exposé on a dishonest home cleaning service. Basically, the staff were caught on camera as they stole from their clients, while they were supposedly there cleaning the clients’ homes. What was really interesting was how the process worked.

The TV crew set up the situation in advance, by putting a large bowl full of change — nickles, dimes, quarters — on the dresser in one of the bedrooms. What would happen was the cleaners would come by, glance at the bowl of change, and take some. But the interesting thing was that they never took ALL the change. At least, not at once.

Often, the same cleaner would walk by the same bowl repeatedly, and each time he or she did, would just take a little of the change. A few quarters, a little bit. A “dip of the beak,” as the Mafia guys say in the movies. Comically, by the end of their shift, they would have emptied nearly the entire bowl of its change. But they never took it all at once. Which makes absolutely no logical sense.

But of course, the process was not really logical. The cleaner would probably tell him- or herself, I’m only taking a little. Just a few coins. They won’t ever miss them. They might not even have remembered that by the end of the shift, they’d have taken “just a few coins” maybe five or six times. Apparently, stealing small amounts didn’t register the same way in their minds as taking the whole bowl full of money all at once.

And that, of course, is entirely human. Which to say, not at all logical or rational.

Which brings us to the measuring “cops.”

When I jotted down some notes for this post, I actually made a Freudian slip and typed “cops” instead of “cups.” But then it occurred to me, that’s exactly what I mean. Because when it comes to keeping track of our calorie intake, most of us probably need something like measuring “cops” to keep us honest. (And the same goes for other things, like tracking our exercise.)

Good News on BP and Suggestions for Tracking Your Results

The chart is a screen shot of my blood pressure measurements, which I try to take every morning when I sit down at my computer.  What it shows is that over the course of the time since I started monitoring it, my systolic pressure (the “top number”) has dropped significantly and more important, consistently.  This can’t be due to anything other than my exercise program.

In the long run, blood pressure will generally respond to weight loss, and also, to some extent, to diet (which is why we get all that “lower your salt” advice.)  But personal experience tells me that whenever I’ve been physically pretty active, particularly with lots of good aerobics, my BP tends to be fairly healthy (if you consider still needing a med for it “healthy,” but I take what I can get.)  On the other hand, I’ve never, over many years, stopped in to the doc’s and had it checked and look okay when I was going through one of my “not so much exercise” periods.

So I’m glad that it’s going down.  But I’m also glad that I have the data here to prove it, and in the long run, this may be more critical than my current BP, because it tends to confirm that my skills at monitoring health data are getting better.

As I’ve been mentioning, the real and often unspoken key to weight management is often contained in how well we can manage our behavior.  And very often, we sink or swim in that regard based on ridiculously little things.

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.”

Psych of weigh-in day and the “cat drop metric”

Today is “weigh-in day” and so there is some need for psychology.  So just a word on how that tends to go.

Many folks working on weight loss are familiar with the basics here:

1. Your weight fluctuates — it can actually bounce around as much as five or so pounds from day to day.  So the usual advice is: don’t weigh yourself all the time and get highly reactive to the results, because it’s easy to get discouraged if, say, you weigh the same or even more today than yesterday.  (Especially if you’ve worked your buns off and missed a favorite dessert last night in hopes of a big change today.) (Also, don’t weigh yourself on Monday morning, unless you spend weekends at Camp Lejune or in a monastery living on broth.)

2. If you’re doing a lot of exercise, you’ll probably be adding muscle, and muscle weighs lots more than fat.  So while you’re actually losing fat and replacing it with muscle, which is a much more efficient tissue for weight maintenance (muscle needs more energy to live; fat is basically storage and hardly needs any), you may be disappointed by the scale’s results.

This is all state of the art science and also common sense.  Still… it’s kind of disappointing, isn’t it?  Because for those of us who are chronically tormented by our weight, we still would feel better if the scale said “LESS!!!” every day.