Articles
Web Advice on Calories
Internet calculators are a self-help dream. But, they still can't help you to succeed without motivation. Here's the scoop on what they can and can't do for you.
Although I have yet to hear about a Web-based application that will wax floors or help me push through the last mile of a tough 10K, I did wonder how it could help a fitness junkie.
Self-help advice on the web: the good and the bad on fitness tools | |
They can tell you if your weight should be a concern. They can't tell you if that excess weight is muscle or flab. | |
They can tell you how to calculate target heart rates for aerobic exercise, but they can't tell you what's the best rate given your fitness level. | |
They can demonstrate exercises to benefit specific body parts. | |
They can produce a basic workout for running, weight-training or other activities. | |
They can give you the calorie count on different foods. | |
They can tell you how many calories you'll burn doing an activity. | |
It can tell you how fat you are, or the ratio of fat to muscle. It can tell you how many calories you burn in a given exercise. It can get you started on a fitness program or help you train for a marathon.
It can give you all sorts of information, in all sorts of ways, but the one thing it can't give you is motivation.
With a BMR calculator, for instance, you can determine the number of calories you need to maintain body weight and simple, near-inert biological function.
BMR stands for basal metabolic rate, and the rate will vary, depending. If you live in cooler climates, if you are a man, if you are younger, if you are physically larger, you will have higher BMRs.
I enter my current weight, age and height, then click and, voila, learn that I need 1,904 calories per day to keep breathing.
Then it lets me enter time for different activities above and beyond a couch potato state. I enter 480 minutes for sitting, reading and writing, which would be my work. Then I enter an hour of walking around the house or in town, a half-hour of running and an hour of weight training.
This is a bit of a cheat, because I seldom run and lift on the same day. But if I did, I would need 3,692 calories.
I also learned that using a computer for eight hours a day burns a stunning total of 136 extra calories.
That's all well and good, but how many Big Macs could I eat before I needed to burn off more than my allotted 3,446 calories?
The Calorie Control Council's Enhanced Calorie Counter let me compile a record of my daily intake, item by item. So if I have a piece of coffee cake for breakfast, and two leftover pieces of pizza for lunch, I will have consumed 777 calories only 2,700 more to go.
Other online apps help define your ideal weight. Calculators tell me I should weigh between 184 and 202 pounds. Some come with a disclaimer that the calculator doesn't allow for body fat or lean muscle tissue, so it is only an estimate.
I'll take that. At least I know I'm not waaaaay out of range.
But how much of that is muscle, and how much fat? I'm not delusional. I know I'm carrying a small touring-bike tire. So I go over to self.com, and use its body fat percentage calculator. And it tells me this:
"Your total weight is about 31.7 percent fat, a dangerously high level of fat to be carrying on your frame."
I think I'm going back to the mirror. At least it knows when to shut up.
Related Items