Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Used Watch


I used my new watch yesterday. It occurred to me that if I just run the stop watch all day, then it will count my calories all day for me too.
It was a little bit disconcerting actually. I did eat breakfast before school. And I did work out, but at the end of the workout, I had only burned about 400 calories and I thought something like, "Well, if that's all I burn in a medium type workout, then I must not be using as many calories per day as I thought. I'm only going to burn around 2200 kcal today."
So in the early afternoon when I was getting hungry and I hadn't eaten since breakfast, I checked my watch and it said I had burned over 1600 calories already. I hadn't even done anything since breakfast! I thought something like "Man! I'm gunna die if I don't hurry up and eat something. I can't believe how many calories it takes just to continue living while I do nothing."
Fortunately, I had some Cliff bars and a Lara bar in my backpack, so I didn't die. I wished that I had a bottle of water in there too, because then I could have not-died in better style, but the empty bottle I had was starting to get a little gross, so I didn't want to fill it again.
I continued to not do anything active the rest of the day and I lived like I normally do with the exception of wearing my watch and the chest band. I also wore it to bed. It's amazing how many calories I burn while I sleep.
The watch also tells me continuously what my heart rate is. That was interesting because I thought I should have a heart rate of around 65 all day except when I exert myself. It turns out that 65 is only good for a resting and really doing nothing heart rate. An awake and moving around doing nothing heart rate for me is closer to 90. Before bed, while I read my scriptures etc I checked my watch a few times and my heart rate dropped below 50 sometimes.
So my calorie reading this morning was 3300 kcal. !!!!!!1 My metabolism is higher than I thought. I don't know how I cram that many calories into me every day. I also don't have any idea how many calories are in most foods, so I don't really have that much frame of reference to justify my surprise.

3 comments:

Tamara Robertson Turner said...

Hey, Amor. I sure am glad you didn't die. That would have been disappointing!

Also, It is very easy to eat 3000+ calories. It is a lot, but easy to do. If you start calculating your caloric intake, I think you will be very surprised and impressed that I can limit mine to 1500. (That's half of what you eat.)

You should ask my mom to tell you the story of when she calculated my dad's breakfast one Saturday morning. : )

Jocelyn said...

This device you have intrigues me. Does it have to be calibrated to your body or does the relationship between heart rate and calories expended fairly stable between different humans?

P.S. I want one. I wouldn't go as far as to say I need one, but that was my first thought. Where'd you get it? What's it called? I need details.

Jack Turner said...

I got it from buy.com. Here's the link:
http://enews.buy.com/cgi-bin5/DM/y/nn3u0LQ6Px0OTK0CP4j0G4

I did put my own body info into the watch, so I'd guess that it is person-specific.