("You Can’t Outrun Your Dinner Plate")
You can’t outrun your dinner plate.
No matter how hard you exercise, what you eat (and how much) will impact how successful you are in achieving your fitness goals.
Most of us are trying to maintain a specific weight or even lose a few pounds, so it’s critical that we understand achieving a desired body weight is based on a simple formula.
To maintain our weight, calories taken in minus calories burned must equal zero.
Losing weight (which most of us need to do) requires that we burn more calories than we take in.
You’ll need to have approximately a 3,500 calorie deficient to burn a pound of fat.
The problem for most of us is we don’t really know how many calories we’re ingesting during the day or how many calories we’re burning during normal daily activities and exercise.
You can estimate the impact of calories taken in minus calories burned by weighing yourself on a regular basis, but that’s after the fact – your plate may be “outrunning” you and you don’t know why.
A more personal and scientific approach is to keep a log for a few weeks that documents calories ingested and the calories burned by physical activity. This will give you an accurate picture of why your plate is out-running you, since most people overestimate calories burned and underestimate calories from food.
Do this for several weeks and you just might find that magic formula that turns you into a lean, mean fitness machine.
I’m in the same situation that many of you are in – a few pounds heavier than I want to be. My current weight is about 185 pounds and has gradually edged upward, but I want to be at about 175 by the end of the summer.
I work out 6 days per week, with several hard bike, run, or strength sessions that total up to an average of about seven hours per week of healthy exercise.
Those workouts burn a lot of calories each week, but my plate still seems to be winning the race.
To determine why “the plate” is currently winning, I tracked all of my calories burned during exercise and calories taken in for a week using on-line calculators.
I started with my basal metabolism rate (BMR) – the minimum amount of energy needed to keep your body functioning each day when at rest. Gender, age, height and weight determine this number, and there’s a good on-line calculator for this at myfitnesspal.com/bmr-calculator.
That calculator suggests that I need about 1,700 calories per day to fuel my base metabolism needs. This number will vary for different individuals based on weight, gender, and age
For exercise, I logged each workout in minutes and then went to runnersworld.com/tools/daily-calories-calculator to determine what the “calorie burn” was for each fitness activity.
The third piece of the puzzle was tracking how many calories I ingested during the test week using the on-line calculator at webmd.com/diet/healthtool-food-calorie-counter.
All of this data was compiled in an Excel spreadsheet, although a simple paper journal would have also worked fine.
Here’s what the data showed at the end of the week. Total calories burned were about 17,500 (base metabolism plus exercise) and total calories taken in were approximately 14,500.
The bottom line – I barely out-ran my plate during the measurement week.
I’ll keep tracking calories in and calories burned for several more weeks, but it appears that the verdict is in.
To outrun my plate and reach my goal weight by September 1st, I’ll need to have an average calorie deficit of 2,300 calories per week during each of the next 15 weeks to lose 10 pounds.
That means either doing more workouts (not likely given time constraints) or eating smaller portions of foods that are less calorie-dense and more nutrient-dense.
The bottom line is that - for whatever fitness goal you’re trying to achieve - you want your food to propel you toward that goal instead of working against you.
It’s shaping up to be a long summer war between body weight and my wife’s great cooking.
More lettuce and tomatoes, less bacon, watermelon instead of ice cream, fresh foods instead of processed and good San Angelo water instead of those after-workout beers.
Ride On, San Angelo, and remember – you are what you eat, and you can’t outrun your dinner plate.
(Author's note: The ASUFit program at Angelo State University is currently using the same process described above for the summer mini-fitness challenge. It is open to the public and details are posted at http://www.angelo.edu/services/fitness_wellness/fitnesschallenge/).
Bill Cullins is an old cyclist, slow runner, and former state Masters cyclocross champion. His column appears every Saturday. Contact him at bcullins@suddenlink.net.
Upcoming events
- June 1: Run in the Sun 8K, roadlizards.org
- June 8: Tour de Burma cycling ride, sanangelobicycleassociation.com
- June 15: Flippin Sweet 5K and 1-mile, roadlizards.org
- June 22: Stop, Drop, and Roll run, roadlizards.org
- July 14: Lake Nasworthy Triathlon, roadlizards.org
- July 27: Goodfellow Traithlon, roadlizards.org
