I've chosen to post the link to The Wall in the main menu of this site. There's no need to hide it on the sidebar—runs counter to its purpose!

Treadmill Calories

I've been wrestling with how to approach the discrepancy between my treadmill workout and my elliptical. As I've written recently, my approach to my workouts is not so much minutes based, rather, calorie goals to better fit my overall objective.

But the thing is, while my elliptical allows me to punch in my weight, my treadmill in an offline context does not. And clearly, I have an incentive to spend more time on the elliptical because the number difference is huge—why waste time doing something that's not burning as many calories?

However, I know that my treadmill numbers were not an accurate portrayal. So, after a little bit of calculation, I realized the treadmill just assumes a 155 lb weight, which is clearly arbitrary —incidentally my goal weight from a 30,000 foot view. A couple of weeks ago, my weigh-in was at 245. Adjusted for weight, it's over a 60% increase in calories burned. So, I went back to my numbers and fixed them for weight.

I weigh less than 245 now, no doubt in the lower 230s by now, but calorie burning is not an exact science anyway—it's not off by 60% at least!

Saturated Fat & Genetics

Yesterday, I referenced reading my 23andMe info. I also found I have a GG: for the APOA2 gene, making me produce less apolipoprotein A-II. As 23andMe states:

Your genetic result is associated with a 6% higher BMI on diets with more than 22 grams of saturated fat per day. Diets with the same number of calories but lower in saturated fat are not associated with higher BMIs in people with your result.

How does this impact me? In real world terms, if I had followed a high saturated fat, for example, straight up Atkins and kept my calories unchanged, in my last weigh-in, I could have quite possibly weighed 260 instead of 245 lbs. That is a significant difference!

I've been on Atkins a time or two, but I found it untenable. That said, the diet I constructed is low carb at 20.* net carbs and high fat, but of the 69.4 grams of fat, only 8 of it is from saturated fat, well below the 22 gram threshold.

When it comes to Atkins or any popular diet, I get a real sense that people follow them because they don't want to change the specifics of what they eat, yet expect change for themselves. But the thing is, our bodies are just the result of our actions. It's simple: if we eat the same, expect the same. And while I do believe a low carb diet is a successful approach to weightloss, there's a perception that Atkins is bacon, bacon, bacon, rack of ribs and STEAK! While the Atkins literature references vegetables, I doubt its adherents choose it for the broccoli. The results can be there, but health is much more than weightloss.

Who wants sick skinny?