Summer Fun
Matthew has, really, been too modest. Those of us who have seen him recently know that he’s allowed his hair to grow well beyond its previous bounds, and so he has lost sufficient weight to drop to the low 150s even with this new baggage. Looks good, though.
While I wish I could report my own foray into the 150s, I can’t. 160 has proven a particularly persistent barrier, to the point where I even did a little side check to ensure that my scale was, in fact, capable of registering lower weights. Much to my disappointment, it can. This morning I checked in at 161, which certainly isn’t bad in the grand scheme of things. And yesterday I bought pants with a 31 inch waist, and that felt pretty good too. I’ve also donated most of my old belts, along with an assortment of pants and shirts to a Red Cross clothing drive. Alia iacta est.
Actually, I’m surprised I’ve managed to stay in the low 160s, since the last month has featured several weddings, a college graduation and lots of dining out at various conferences, fundraisers, birthdays and general celebrations.
I should probably correct Matthew’s math, however. According to this site, a standard large single-person package of M&Ms has 253 calories. Based on my cardio workout yesterday, I can burn that off in 18 minutes of torture. Of course, the real benefit is to skip the cupcake and hit the gym.
I still maintain that the workout bottleneck for most people is not the workout itself, but all the accompanying logistics. The workout is fun. The wasted half hour getting to and from the gym is not.
William et. al. - I check this site out every couple of months, and although I have never posted, I felt compelled to chime in on this post! I want to warn you of the perils of relying on the always-wrong calorie counts of most cardio machines at gyms. I’ve heard from a variety of reliable sources (personal trainers galore and weight watchers leaders alike) that those calorie counts can overestimate by as much as 40%. So, for that bag of M&Ms, you might need to go for about 30 minutes. Sorry to burst your bubble! Hope y’all are all doing well. Back to bar exam prep for me…
–Leslie Harvey
Comment on June 19, 2005 @ 9:35 pm
Hi Leslie,
Kind of correct, since knowing that I had already estimated downward. The rule of thumb is apparently to knock off about 20%, provided that you put in the right weight values and you’ve already warmed up. The numbers are also apparently a bit more accurate for interval training settings since they tend to boost the metabolism a bit more.
I also did the estimate against the jumbo-bag of M&Ms….
Comment on June 21, 2005 @ 12:11 pm
William -
Maybe I need to start interval training, then! I’d imagine the discrepancy may be due to gender as well. Because men have greater muscle mass (in terms of percentage of body weight), I’d think a man would burn more calories than a woman at the same weight. Shouldn’t they have a gender input on the machine? That would probably violate some PC rule though.
Happy cardio workouts everyone!
–Leslie
Comment on June 23, 2005 @ 8:49 am