Tools

At the beginning of the year, I used a combination of tools to give me a better understanding of my calorie intake vs burn throughout the day.  I thought someone out there might benefit from this info as to not waste time trying to figure it out.

The first tool I began using this year is an app called Calorie Counter.  This app was instrumental in teaching me my calorie intake. It's one thing to think that you are eating a minimum number of calories, and quite another to see it add up all day long!  I learned that I can stay pretty comfortable consuming between 1600-1800 calories per day.  With a Shakeology breakfast, salad lunch, yogurt and/or protein bar snacks and a well balanced dinner it's a satisfying day.  The less artificial foods you eat, the less cravings for them you have.  Seriously, the only way a healthy diet will work is to cut out artificial processed foods completely.

After a while eating this way and using the app, I have gained a pretty good understanding of serving sizes and high calorie/carb/fat foods.  I don't use the app much anymore but it gave me the building blocks of knowledge to really analyze my day.

The second must have tool is the BodyBugg.  This thing is amazing!  It calculates the users calorie burn by measuring your weight, heart rate, and perspiration rate.  I wore the BodyBugg for about a month.  It gave me a great understanding of how many calories I burn while doing different activities.  I was able to determine that on average, without any kind of exercise, I burn about 2000-2200 calories.  This is just in every day housework, shopping etc.  That's a good number to know when you are trying to lose weight.  Generally speaking...for every 3500 calories burned, you lose one pound of fat so knowing how many calories you take in is vital to knowing how many you need to burn.

Important tid bits of info I learned from BodyBugg: an hour at Curves burns about about 576 calories.  An hour walking burns about 335 calories.  It takes about 20 minutes of walking to raise your heart rate to a fat burning level.  So, for all of you out there who walk for 20 minutes at a time...you're stopping before your burning fat!  It's good for your overall health to walk so it's not necessarily a waste of time, it's just not an effective fat burning work out to walk...more like a good way to get in the habit of exercising as a routine and to maintain basic health. On the elliptical, I burn about 550 calories in an hour.

The difference between Curves and the elliptical is that I don't actually spend an hour at Curves. It takes about 25 minutes to complete the circuit.  Even when I round the circle three times (which I do regularly), it's a total of 37 1/2 minutes.  So that's about.. 360 calories for the work out.  It's about the same as an hour walk but in less time.  Less time is good!  Less time means more burn for your effort.

So..taking the two important tools information into account, I can see that on an elliptical day, I burn about 2850 (2200 daily burn + 550 workout) calories.  I'm eating about 1800 calories in a day giving me an surplus of about 900 calories on that day.  If I do that three times a week, that's 2700 extra calories right there.  A Curves day, I will burn about 2560 (2200 daily burn + 360 workout) calories.  2560-1800 intake of calories is a surplus of 760.  If I do that twice a week, that's 1520 calories added to my weekly burn, now at 4220. One more day to account for: yoga day.  I do not know how much calories I will burn doing yoga because I haven't done it yet with the BodyBugg.  However, giving it a guess...I would say it should be about the same as a one hour  walk.  I calculated that to be about 335 calories in an hour.  2200 + 335=2535 daily calorie burn.  2535-1800=735 surplus.

SO...adding up the total surplus of calories for a week in my new schedule effective this week: Monday-735 + Tuesday-760 + Wednesday-900 + Thursday-760 + Friday-900 + Saturday-900=4955 surplus per week. 3500/4955 or about 1.42 lbs per week.  That gives me a total poundage loss prediction over my current 8 week schedule of: 11.36 lbs.  This is just a rough estimate but is my best guess.

More tools!  A good heart rate monitor is essential to planning a fat burning specific workout!  You can get them pretty much anywhere...you want the chest strap! It will usually be compatible with gym equipment to give you a constant monitor during your hardest workouts.  My target heart rate for burning fat is 120-156.  I can work out harder than that, but would start burning calorie from muscle, increasing my endurance but burning less fat.

There can also be variations in calorie burn based on body type, metabolism and diet, i.e., eat a high in fat diet, you will have more new fat to burn before you can get around to the excess fat in your body.  Although I have some "hard data" figures here..it's really just an educated guess.  Of course less calorie intake means more surplus/poundage loss as well.  Since I did not account for the three weekly interval training sessions in my schedule as part of this calculation or the laps I swim after every work out.. I may lose even more, and so might you using the same schedule!  Everyone is different!  These tools allow you to figure out what works for you!  Ahh.. the beauty of tools.

Anyhoo... if you are interested in checking out the Bodybugg click the link.  For the Calorie counter app, just search for it in the app store.  It's the one with the green apple logo.  Questions/Comments?  See below!  And stay tuned to see if my weight loss prediction proves correct :)