<p>deb: what’s the app? </p>
<p>Idad that REALLY made me chuckle!!!</p>
<p>3.1 done in the neighborhood - and I will say that sometimes running in a neighborhood is a nice change of pace from a trail because you DO have to sometimes stop/pause at corners for traffic or for the “walk” sign to change- it’s not long but enough to give a breather!! </p>
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<p>I figure that all the young whippersnappers running up the mountains around here in trail running shoes and running shorts probably have the energy to carry a saw and clear the fallen trees and branches… Give 'em something to do with all that excess energy!</p>
<p>Thanks MOWC. That’s good to know. I don’t want people to run into me when I start walking but that sounds like it won’t be a problem. </p>
<p>The app I bought is called Easy 10k with Jeff Galloway. There are 5k and half marathon apps also. It’s kind of cheesy actually, Jeff has inspirational talks throughout the run. The app has two shorter runs and then one longer run per week. </p>
<p>BB, good luck in Boston and most importantly, enjoy every moment. It no doubt will be an experience that will be memorable on many levels.</p>
<p>For those of you who track food and exercise caloric metrics, I’ve been running been running Weight Watchers and My Fitness Pal side by side for several months with some interesting results. Depending on what I eat, I can exhaust by daily food allotment with different quantities of food on a given day. In other words, different foods correlate differently in comparing calories (MFP) to Points (WW). Also, for a particular food, there is only one point value in WW while for some foods in MFP, particularly some store brand prepared foods, there can be several different caloric values and it is often difficult to determine which caloric value actually applies to what you are eating.</p>
<p>On the exercise front, I’ve concluded that the caloric value for cycling can be wildly off for both. As I’ve posted before, WW doesn’t differentiate between cycling at 13 mph vs at 18 mph for a given unit of time. MFP has multiple speed ranges to choose from but the caloric value does not take into account any individual characteristics such as body weight, hr, fitness levels, resting hr and heart rate reserve etc. I recently did a very relaxed 55 miles at a 15.5 avg and MFP gave me about a 1400 calorie burn. My Garmin 805 GPS which is programmed with my body weight, age, max hr, resting hr and frequency of working out as well as long term exercise factor (i.e. Estimated fitness level), gave me 898 calories. Similarly, an hour of indoor spinning gives me about 800 calories on MFP while the measure of actual kilojoules produced gives me about 575 calories burned. Fortunately, with MFP you can override the default calories and I can enter the info from my Garmin or Wahoo Kickr. I’m going to continue to use MFP for another month as I move full swing into the cycling season and if I’m able to keep my weight stable in my desired 155-157 range, I’ll drop Weight Watchers.</p>
<p>Off to do another 55 mile ride. It’s another perfect cycling day!</p>
<p>T-2 for BB and you go girl! :)</p>
<p>Re walking…my pal who won her age group in the iron walked part of the last bit…didn’t seem to hurt her time :)</p>
<p>Michael, my trainer friend says all the online trackers are over-generous in estimating caloric burn. For this reason, I don’t subtract calories generally…but in my case I figure the differential is made up in my general inability o count portion size with any accuracy 
so your calculations sound about right!</p>
<p>MKAT:</p>
<p>Interesting comparison. The Garmin has got to be closer to accurate, given that its formula takes heart rate/intensity into account. </p>
<p>Calories are actually a poor way to measure food intake and energy output as neither can be estimated with any precision at all. Certainly not within 10% error on either side of the equation. A 10% error in either direction would – according to the calorie theories – result in a gain or loss of 20 pounds a year. A gain or loss of 200 pounds over ten years. Of course, that’s not what actually happens. If it did work that way, nobody would be able to maintain stable weight, no matter how hard they tried, a world of unlimited food availability.</p>
<p>And, that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that 100 calories of sour gummi worms and 100 calories of salmon are metabolically very different. As are 100 calories of weight lifting versus 100 calories of zumba. Or, the same 100 calories of the same food are going to be very different metabolically when eaten by someone who is highly insulin resistant and someone who is not. Or even the same person who is glycogen depleted or not.</p>
<p>This stuff is all tightly regulated by the body, far more tightly regulated than possible based on caloric balance and tightly regulated in ways that dwarf our application of willpower. I think the really smart guys in the field understand that the best bet is to target behaviors that tilt the body’s tight regulation in our favor.</p>
<p>I think that, in general, tracking exercise calories as a component of weight management is a probably a mistake. The big problem is that none of these calculators highlight the net calories burned (compared to sitting on the sofa watching TV). The kind of exercise that most calorie counters are doing represents such a small incremental difference that it doesn’t have much impact (on the calorie equation), so the calculators just end up being “permission” to eat more.</p>
<p>Speaking of weight tracking… A milestone for me today. My target range for the last two years has been 160 to 165. When my 7-day average hit 166.8 right after New Years Day, I knew I had to tighten up. </p>
<p>As of this morning, my 7-day average has been under 160 for sixteen days in a row and my 28 day average dropped below 160 for the first time since 2011, when it was below 160 for a short 3-month window at the absolute bottom of my fat loss.</p>
<p>I haven’t been tracking my food for the last month, but doing the daily food log for a few months to start the year broke me of some bad habits that had crept in snack wise and let me recalibrate a bit.</p>
<p>You have really achieved leanness, iDad! Congratulations.</p>
<p>10 miles with my daughter on a new (to me) greenway. It was very flat. She is now faster than me, so it was a little harder than I wanted it to be HR-wise. Done, though. Beautiful day here today- although windy for the bikers. </p>
<p>Do not forget Garmin, BB! Do not forget to charge it either. :)</p>
<p>Good luck BB!</p>
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<p>I got so tired of trying to herd all the bits and pieces into the car, one by one: wallet, iPod, headphones, Garmin watch, HRM strap, cell phone, glasses, camera, battery charger, Kindle, etc. that I finally broke down and bought a “gear box”</p>
<p>[Kelty</a> Cache Box](<a href=“http://www.kelty.com/images/Product/large/724.jpg]Kelty”>http://www.kelty.com/images/Product/large/724.jpg)</p>
![http://www.kelty.com/images/Product/large/724.jpg]Kelty](http://www.kelty.com/images/Product/large/724.jpg%5DKelty){kind=link}
<p>Now, everything just goes in the box. The box gets zipped, And, the box gets carried to the car. In fact, the box sits next to al the USB cables/chargers and all that stuff pretty much lives in the box.</p>
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<p>Basement workout for me. Punched the clock, but a solid workout. Single leg deadlifts, TRX pushups, DB front squats, 3 pt row.</p>
<p>MOWC, every time I ride with my daughter, I’m painfully reminded of the advantages of youth! :)</p>
<p>IDad, I don’t think the calorie counting issue is simplistic at all. The various factors you mention certainly impact on the entire approach to structuring a nutrition plan and online calculators of base caloric needs are estimates that make for rough starting points that need to be refined and dialed in. But calories need to be counted in some form and fashion in order to ultimately reach weight goals. And in this regard, factoring in exercise burn factors can be critically important to achieving and maintaining weight and body composition goals. The problem, as you note, is that most calorie calculators on health club equipment are notoriously “off” and if a person routinely attempts to eat based on those additional calories, they are bound to ultimately have problems. </p>
<p>Conversely, there are those whose training levels are so high that the failure to attempt to eat additional food to cover the exercise based deficit would prove disastrous. When you stop and consider the level of training and caloric burn associated with marathon racing or long distance high intensity cycling, a person engaged in those endeavors ends up struggling to eat enough to prevent losing lean body mass and to maintain energy levels. When I was using Weight Watchers, I had to eat back my exercise points lest I start to drop weight precipitously and be totally energy depleted. On MFP, I must eat back my exercise calories, other wise the same thing will occur.</p>
<p>The trick to to make sure that you have an accurate calculation of base caloric needs and of exercise burn and not just inaccurate estimates.</p>
<p>Got anxious in the middle of the (long) Easter Vigil church service tonight when the Vivofit red line appeared and there was NO possibility of escaping the pew for a stroll. Sometimes you just have to stay put! </p>
<p>Seems like you should get vivofit points for sitting in church…</p>
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<p>MKat:</p>
<p>I don’t know. I think it’s much simpler than that. Tracking food, whether you use “calories” or “points” or “grams of carbs” is worthwhile to the extent it gives you a baseline awareness of what you are eating. If you want to lose weight and aren’t, then you’ve got to eat less, so you try to identify something to cut. If you don’t want to lose weight and are, then you’ve got to eat more, whether that’s bigger portions, a few handfuls of nuts, a six pack of Heinekens, or whatever. None of that requires a number for calories in or calories out. It’s simply up or down on the food relative to the scale going up or down. That’s the simple approach. I never needed to add up a single calorie of exercise because, with whatever exercise I am doing, I am either losing weight or not.</p>
<p>The much more challenging question is how you eat less (or more) I don’t think you can fight hunger with willpower (for long) That’s where it helps to tilt the hormonal regulation of energy in your favor. For example, if you can burn 500 calories a day of stored fat, then you can eat 500 calories less per day and not be hungry. So the question isn’t so much, where can I cut 500 calories?, but how can I encourage my body burn 500 calories of stored fat today so I’m not hungry for the 500 calories I’m not eating? Since one of the actions of elevated insulin is to lock fat in fat cells, specifically so it CAN’T be burned, one thing that you could do is lower your average insulin levels.throughout the day.</p>
<p>If you put yourself in a caloric deficit, but keep your insulin up all day long by eating a slug of simple carbs every few hours, you ensure that you can’t burn stored fat. But, with the caloric deficit, you are guaranteed to be perpetually hungry. Especially if you are insulin resistant.</p>
<p>People can’t just will themselves to “eat less” and “exercise more”. At least not many people can. The answer is to make yourself want to eat less and want to exercise more, so you just do it automatically. An extra 500 calories a day of energy from fat stores will tend to do just that!</p>
<p>IDad, I guess you can do it by a “seat of the pants” approach as you describe but I would find it very difficult to lose and then maintain weight in a controlled,systematic and safe manner. While there are those for whom metabolic issues are a problem, for most people, I think it boils down to calories in versus calories out while eliminating junk foods and consuming foods with good nutritional content. So the question becomes how do you know where you are in the energy balance equation and promote weight loss without bouncing around by eating too little one day or too much the next and having your weight loss similarly fluctuate.</p>
<p>And I think trying to target fat burning presents it’s own conundrums. Exercise that relies on fat metabolism for its energy sources is of low intensity. It’s not time efficient nor do you get the critical health and fitness benefits that higher intensity exercise provides. While high intensity exercise burns more fat in a unit of time than low intensity exercise, the energy process for high intensity exercise shifts to heavy reliance on carbohydrates as an energy source. And even if you are successful in burning 500 calories of fat, how do you determine that and then how do you measure whether you have consumed 500 calories less unless you track the foods you eat? </p>
<p>For me, tracking the caloric burn of my training program is critical. On days that I do resistance training, not so much but on days that I do long duration high intensity cardio (cycling), if I don’t track calories in and out and balances of fat, proteins and carbs, I will quickly end up in a significant energy deficit, lose lean muscle tissue and not be able to perform. Yesterday, based on my a Garmin, I burned over 1400 calories on my bike ride. I ate very healthy meals during the day and made sure to consume enough calories to avoid weight loss. Going by the seat of the pants based just on hunger wouldn’t cut it. Unless I replace those calories, it wouldn’t take long to experience significant weight loss I don’t want but if I attempted to do so based on “feel” I could find my weight varying significantly from week to week rather than remaining stable, which is not desirable.</p>
<p>Youth, in addition to younger bodies, has another advantage - inexperience that lets them do things that could be considered stupid by people who “have been there”. Would you ever try to run 21 kilometers without any, I mean, any training!!! Turns out, my non-runner D just did that. I’m speechless (and mad and worried that she wrecked her body). She finished her half in 2 hours and 28 minutes, which is not fast, but… given the fact that she has not trained and never, ever ran anything more than a 10k… </p>
<p>Now, talk about missing my chance to sleep in for additional 30 minutes… by mere 2 seconds! “The break between Wave 2 and Wave 3 (11:00 a.m.) is 3:33:34.” Rats. Off to get my registration packet and enjoy the sunshine. The hotel staff are wearing Adidas tees with the marathon logo. Awesome. </p>
<p>Good luck to those running in Boston tomorrow!</p>
<p>I would weigh in (no pun intended) on the calories in/out convo but it’s just too complicated. I did just read that they have discovered that the hormone ghrelin is implicated. It controls your metabolism partly based on whether you <em>think</em> something you just ate has a lot of calories or not. Isn’t that startling? </p>
<p>DH, S, and I had a nice long walk yesterday. It just kept getting longer (cause the weather was so pleasant and there was a new park under construction that we thought we’d just go “see”) and by the time we turned around to go home, it was going to be close to 5 miles total. Now if I can just get DH to do this more often…when the weather Isn’t so pleasant…</p>
<p>Bunsen, good luck tomorrow! I’m looking forward to your post race report.</p>
<p>BB: Welcome to New England! I’ve been tellin’ you about our glorious spring weather…:)</p>
<p>I’ve found that measuring the calories and the exercise on myfitnesspal is pretty accurate for me. Been measuring again the last 2-3 months and I have it set on 1400 net calories. Have stayed at a consistent 140 lbs. I think if you are burning close to or over 1000 calories cycling or running you need to track the exercise. The exercise reward system works for me for the (gasp!) occasional yogurt cone at mcdonalds. If I don’t walk the mile to mcdonalds and back then no ice cream!</p>
<p>Did a 25 miler on the bike yesterday. A little over 16 mph pace. Wish I could go faster and longer like Mcat. I need a bigger butt and heftier thighs. Tried to pass some “heftier” cyclists on the bike path yesterday but they kicked my a**. Seems like muscle wins out over cardio on the bike! And it seems like cycling takes more out if me and longer to recover even though it doesn’t seem like I’m pushing the cardio engine as much. Think I might want to get a triathlon bike so I can ride more upright and less pressure on my wimpy wrists. Any thoughts Mcat? I know you have said that you like rising “wheel to wheel” with the more experienced cyclists but it makes me nervous riding that close.</p>
<p>Think I’m going to head to the track later tonight. Worried that 70 degrees might never come again . </p>