Exercise?

Last night marked my first real attempt at taking one of my old staple recipes and adjusting it to fit into my available WW points. Chad's mentioned a number of times that he really misses my beef stroganoff, so I entered it into the recipe calculator to see if it was anywhere close to a reasonable number of points. To put it mildly, it wasn't...37 points per serving. Generally, my entire dinner is in the neighborhood of 25 points.

Ouch.

So I started adjusting...light sour cream instead of regular, half the amount of butter, ¾ lb of meat instead of 1 ¼ lb (partially offset by increasing the mushrooms from ¾ lb to 1 lb), and 6 oz of no-yolk noodles instead of 8 oz of regular noodles. All these changes resulted in reducing the points value to 25 per serving. Much better! I was a little concerned about there being enough to eat after having reduced the meat by almost half and the noodles by a quarter, but there was plenty and then some. I wasn't even able to finish my half. I was afraid the no-yolk noodles wouldn't be very good, but they weren't bad...a little odd, particularly in texture, but not bad.

Yesterday's meals:

Breakfast: Oatmeal, banana - 10 points
Lunch: Tomato-beef broth, salad- 12 points
Snack: Apple - 0 points
Dinner: Beef stroganoff, green beans, milk - 30 points
Dessert: Pudding with Cool Whip - 4 points
Total: 57 points

So obviously over the last week or so I've been doing a lot of thinking about my program and my success - or lack of it - in losing weight. Since even in the weeks where I stick to my program like glue I'm usually not losing much, I've reached the conclusion that the problem must be in the other half of the equation - exercise.

The WW points system is not based solely on calories, but on relative amounts of protein, fat, carbs, and fiber. While I think this nutrition-based approach is a good one, in the end the basis of weight loss is burning more calories than you consume. Since the WW tracker doesn't give calorie counts, I entered a typical 55-point day in another tracker and came out at about 2400 calories. I find that interesting, since I calculated my Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR) with a couple of different calculators and came out with that same number: 2400 calories. Your BMR is the number of calories that you burn simply by being alive. If I were to stay in bed all day and not do anything, that's the number of calories I'd use. Basically, then, since my intake is equal to my BMR, the weight I lose is dependent on the amount of exercising I do.

Over the last 3 weeks, I've increased my daily exercise quite a bit. The week before last, I started doing 15 minutes of Wii boxing every morning. Last week I increased that to 15 minutes of boxing in the morning and 15 minutes of swordfighting in the afternoon, for a total of 30 minutes daily. This week I've increased it again - 20 minutes of boxing in the morning and in the afternoon for a daily total of 40 minutes. I thought that was pretty good...until I looked up the number of calories it's burning. For every 15 minutes, Wii boxing burns 125 calories. That means that my 40 minutes is only burning about 350 calories or so.

There are 3500 calories in a pound of fat. If I'm only burning an extra 350 calories per day, that means I'm only going to lose a pound every 10 days! Obviously those 350 calories from boxing aren't the only calories beyond my BMR that I'm burning, since I'm not in bed all day, but I'm not entirely sure how to calculate the calories I'm burning doing the dishes and vacuuming and making dinner and sitting at the computer and so on. With 3500 calories in a pound of fat, if I want to average 4 pounds per week, I need to burn about 2000 extra calories per day. Now I just need to figure out how to do that...