R
Ryan Cousineau
Guest
In article <[email protected]>,
Stephen Harding <[email protected]> wrote:
> David Kerber wrote:
>
> > In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> >
> >>But I'm actually now thinking I have to cut back some on the food.
> >>I think losing 10 pounds would be good for me, and since my normal
> >>commuting to work (~25 miles round trip) doesn't lose weight, I
> >>suppose I'll just have to drink more water instead of Coke. I think
> >>that would actually go a long way in cutting some pounds over a
> >>long period.
> >
> > If you still want the taste or the caffiene, just switching to diet
> > could do that for you. My dad used to drink a 6-pack of Dr. Pepper
> > every day. When he switched to diet Dr. Pepper about three years ago,
> > he dropped about 40 lbs over the course of a year without changing
> > anything else in his lifestyle. Since then, he's gone LC and dropped
> > another 50 lbs in the past year, and still has about 50 to go.
>
> That's encouraging. I drink *a lot* of Coke. I can down a liter
> bottle during the day, every day, so cutting back on the stuff should
> go a long way in cutting caloric intake.
http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/nutrition/coca-cola.asp
Coke: 430 kcal/l. 3000 calories*, as a rule of thumb, makes for a
1-pound weight loss, so you could expect to lose about 1 pound per week
if you simply stopped drinking pop.
> But I really just don't like the diet stuff, of any brand. Something
> about the taste of fake sugar.
>
> Water is fine...but that brings up other dietary/physiological issues
> from what I've read. Too much water can wash out [water soluble]
> vitamins and minerals!
I daresay it's not doing anything the Coke isn't, since Coke is almost
all water. If it really scares you (my gut instinct is that this concern
is silly, especially if you keep your net fluid intake near where it
was), take a multivitamin.
I drink a lot of orange juice at home, which is barely better than Coke
(~415 kcal/l) but my secret is that I'm happy drinking it at
ridiculously diluted levels (I'll cut it down until it's a barely-sweet
straw-coloured beverage), which probably cuts the calories to about a
third of normal OJ.
> Sometimes, I think it was actually better to just deal with the feast
> and famine cycle of successful/unsuccessful mastodon hunts, as in the
> eating lifestyle of our early ancestors!
The trick is not so much that they starved and gorged, but that they
spent all day chasing mastodons. The active lifestyle, in my opinion,
has a lot more to do with weight and health than one's diet.
> Isn't it strange that a genetic mutation that would make natural
> digestion and calorie hording/expenditure less efficient, might
> actually end up being a desirable, survival enhancement in a modern,
> industrial population?
Well, I don't want to raise the ugly spectre of another thread, but
there's a big difference between being skinny and being healthy. The
latter is usually better than obesity, but health benefits (and as Chalo
pointed out elsewhere, lifestyle benefits) accrue to those who do a lot
of exercise, with weight being a lesser factor (I have a suspicion that
an important problem with excess weight is that it limits the amount and
kind of physical activity you can engage in; I dropped from 190 pounds
to 153, and my back problems magically disapppeared).**
*just in case somebody doesn't know, a "calorie" as we talk about them
in nutrition is technically a kilocalorie, a calorie being a measure of
energy (1 calorie (not kilocalorie) is defined as the energy to raise
the temperature of 1g of water by 1 degree C). so a kilocalorie will
raise the temperature of a kilogram of water by 1 degree C. That's why
in the example above I use "kcal" as an abbreviation, then immediately
refer to "calories" even though I'm talking about kilocalories. The
irony is that a calorie is a metric measurement, and so is the Joule,
the common measurement used in metric countries (I get kilojoules on all
my cereal boxes, being Canadian). 1 Joule is the amount of energy needed
to move an object with 1 Newton of force a distance of 1 metre.
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6b.html
The cool bit is that cyclists normally measure power (power=work/time)
output in Watts (250 W being the benchmark for a reasonably trained but
unprofessional rider), and a Watt is 1 J/s, so if you measure your food
in kilojoules and your output with a power meter, you can directly
equate your workout into food energy!
A 300 kcal candy bar (pretty typical) is about 1255 kJ, and if you
sustain 250 watts on the bike, it will take you about 84 minutes on the
bicycle to burn up that candy bar. Punch up your output to 350 W and you
can take care of it in an hour.
Before you freak out, note that normal metabolic activity (commonly
known as being alive) requires thousands of calories per day on its own.
So you don't have to ride 4 hours per day just because you had a big
meal.
**Let's not mention that I now suffer from several minor overuse
maladies including routine tenderness in my Achilles tendons, which
makes it much harder for me to do things like run up and down the 6
flights of stairs at work, something I often do once or twice per day in
the course of my job (computer labs are on the sixth floor, help desk is
on the 0th floor).
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email protected] http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine/wiredcola/
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club
Stephen Harding <[email protected]> wrote:
> David Kerber wrote:
>
> > In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] says...
> >
> >>But I'm actually now thinking I have to cut back some on the food.
> >>I think losing 10 pounds would be good for me, and since my normal
> >>commuting to work (~25 miles round trip) doesn't lose weight, I
> >>suppose I'll just have to drink more water instead of Coke. I think
> >>that would actually go a long way in cutting some pounds over a
> >>long period.
> >
> > If you still want the taste or the caffiene, just switching to diet
> > could do that for you. My dad used to drink a 6-pack of Dr. Pepper
> > every day. When he switched to diet Dr. Pepper about three years ago,
> > he dropped about 40 lbs over the course of a year without changing
> > anything else in his lifestyle. Since then, he's gone LC and dropped
> > another 50 lbs in the past year, and still has about 50 to go.
>
> That's encouraging. I drink *a lot* of Coke. I can down a liter
> bottle during the day, every day, so cutting back on the stuff should
> go a long way in cutting caloric intake.
http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/nutrition/coca-cola.asp
Coke: 430 kcal/l. 3000 calories*, as a rule of thumb, makes for a
1-pound weight loss, so you could expect to lose about 1 pound per week
if you simply stopped drinking pop.
> But I really just don't like the diet stuff, of any brand. Something
> about the taste of fake sugar.
>
> Water is fine...but that brings up other dietary/physiological issues
> from what I've read. Too much water can wash out [water soluble]
> vitamins and minerals!
I daresay it's not doing anything the Coke isn't, since Coke is almost
all water. If it really scares you (my gut instinct is that this concern
is silly, especially if you keep your net fluid intake near where it
was), take a multivitamin.
I drink a lot of orange juice at home, which is barely better than Coke
(~415 kcal/l) but my secret is that I'm happy drinking it at
ridiculously diluted levels (I'll cut it down until it's a barely-sweet
straw-coloured beverage), which probably cuts the calories to about a
third of normal OJ.
> Sometimes, I think it was actually better to just deal with the feast
> and famine cycle of successful/unsuccessful mastodon hunts, as in the
> eating lifestyle of our early ancestors!
The trick is not so much that they starved and gorged, but that they
spent all day chasing mastodons. The active lifestyle, in my opinion,
has a lot more to do with weight and health than one's diet.
> Isn't it strange that a genetic mutation that would make natural
> digestion and calorie hording/expenditure less efficient, might
> actually end up being a desirable, survival enhancement in a modern,
> industrial population?
Well, I don't want to raise the ugly spectre of another thread, but
there's a big difference between being skinny and being healthy. The
latter is usually better than obesity, but health benefits (and as Chalo
pointed out elsewhere, lifestyle benefits) accrue to those who do a lot
of exercise, with weight being a lesser factor (I have a suspicion that
an important problem with excess weight is that it limits the amount and
kind of physical activity you can engage in; I dropped from 190 pounds
to 153, and my back problems magically disapppeared).**
*just in case somebody doesn't know, a "calorie" as we talk about them
in nutrition is technically a kilocalorie, a calorie being a measure of
energy (1 calorie (not kilocalorie) is defined as the energy to raise
the temperature of 1g of water by 1 degree C). so a kilocalorie will
raise the temperature of a kilogram of water by 1 degree C. That's why
in the example above I use "kcal" as an abbreviation, then immediately
refer to "calories" even though I'm talking about kilocalories. The
irony is that a calorie is a metric measurement, and so is the Joule,
the common measurement used in metric countries (I get kilojoules on all
my cereal boxes, being Canadian). 1 Joule is the amount of energy needed
to move an object with 1 Newton of force a distance of 1 metre.
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/6b.html
The cool bit is that cyclists normally measure power (power=work/time)
output in Watts (250 W being the benchmark for a reasonably trained but
unprofessional rider), and a Watt is 1 J/s, so if you measure your food
in kilojoules and your output with a power meter, you can directly
equate your workout into food energy!
A 300 kcal candy bar (pretty typical) is about 1255 kJ, and if you
sustain 250 watts on the bike, it will take you about 84 minutes on the
bicycle to burn up that candy bar. Punch up your output to 350 W and you
can take care of it in an hour.
Before you freak out, note that normal metabolic activity (commonly
known as being alive) requires thousands of calories per day on its own.
So you don't have to ride 4 hours per day just because you had a big
meal.
**Let's not mention that I now suffer from several minor overuse
maladies including routine tenderness in my Achilles tendons, which
makes it much harder for me to do things like run up and down the 6
flights of stairs at work, something I often do once or twice per day in
the course of my job (computer labs are on the sixth floor, help desk is
on the 0th floor).
--
Ryan Cousineau, [email protected] http://www.sfu.ca/~rcousine/wiredcola/
President, Fabrizio Mazzoleni Fan Club
