Day 30

My neighbor, a fellow 30PO has spotted me huffing down the street, despite my best efforts to remain in cognito. She expressed interest in getting in shape and losing some weight. I described my usual route, encouraged her to come along and she signed on to meet this morning at the bottom of her driveway.
It was unseasonably cool, but she was waiting with a 32 ounce Gatorade in hand (200). It was apparent after fifty yards of awkwardly shifting it from hand to hand, that the bottle was making it cumbersome for her to walk. We were going at a fairly slow pace, what normally took me 15 minutes, was taking almost double that time. As we approached her house, she pulled out a Zone Bar (210) and offered me half. She commented it was quite a work out and I told her it was a pleasure walking with her and to call anytime she was ready to go again. I don't think she will.
As I hustled home, I thought that it would have been better, calorie wise, if she hadn't walked at all. She consumed
410 calories in a little over a half hour and burned, maybe 100 max.
How is your forty five minutes of daily exercise coming? Remember, forty five minutes equates to the .66 pounds we need to lose each week in order to meet the goal. It's not in addition to. If you exercise over forty five minutes, that's great and I applaud you.
Don't be misled about exercise; you'd be surprised to learn that the amount of calories you fire off when you get your heart pumping aren't as many as you think. The amount burned is affected by body weight, intensity of work out, conditioning level and metabolism. The best rule of thumb is: 15 minutes of hard exercise=100 calories. For me, that's about one mile of power walking.
Professor Brian Wansink (Cornell University) "conducts experiments to find out how the environment, labels, container size and other visual clues make us eat more." (NY Times, 10/11/06) As a leading consumer psychologist, he observes his subjects as they eat their way through an unlimited buffet. Some of the folks have moderately exercised, the others are couch potatoes. He's measuring the difference between the amount of scalloped potatoes, banana pudding and chili mac on both groups bottomless plates, hoping to prove that the exercisers think they can eat more because they burned off so much more. He has no challenges proving his theory.
If a marathoner runs 26.2 miles at an 11-12 minute mile pace and weighs 150 pounds, she'll burn off 2600 calories during the entire race, not even a pound. Now subtract what is consumed during the marathon: 2 Clif Shots (200), 64 ounces Gatorade (400), 1 banana (90), Cran Razz Shot Blok (200), almost 900 calories consumed against the paltry 2600 she'll burn!
Keep on moving.