Some weighty matters

I have an excellent suggestion for anyone out there who has a problem overeating: exercise on a machine that gives you the estimated calories you are burning during your workout. I swear, after a few days on my trusty new elliptical machine, grocery shopping is a different, and less tempting, experience.

I didn't primarily get the elliptical machine to lose weight, although I wouldn't mind. Mostly I just needed some way to get routine activity into my life. Sure everyone claims that dashing around after a toddler all day is a workout in itself, but at least in my case I would only be saying that to make myself feel better. In my book, no sweat = no workout. Especially after reading a little lately about what an important thing a strong heart is, I want one! As you regularly exercise, your heart gets stronger and stronger so it doesn't need to beat as much since it just pumps that blood right through you, and you can measure this partly through your resting heart rate. My resting heart rate as I'm sitting here is about 84 beats per minute. Apparently elite runners can have heart rates as low as 30 beats per minute. This motivates me to get on that elliptical, even without thinking about all the money I spent on it and the possibility of losing a few pounds.

Having babies really does crazy things to your weight, as any mother will confirm. It is a bizarre thing to gain about 30 pounds in a matter of a few months, and then lose a lot of it in a matter of weeks, and then not lose the rest, well, ever, at least as long as you're breastfeeding your baby. Anyway, I weigh about 150 pounds right now. I don't lose sleep about my weight, but I know that during a semester in college when I paid no particular attention to my weight or what I ate, but was pleasantly active in a 3-times-a-week basketball class and walking the 20 minutes to and from campus each day, I weighed 135 pounds. So while I'm not fat, I weigh more than my body needs to, and losing a few pounds would be great.

Back to the calorie readout. Working out at what the machine says is 90% of my maximum heartrate (I don't think it's quite that much) for 30 minutes, it says I burn 100 calories. Now lets just pretend that last week I bought a bag of cookies, and lets also say, purely for discussion’s sake, you understand, that I more or less ate the whole thing myself over the next few days. And then, as penance, made myself read the nutrition label as I tossed it into the garbage can to discover that every cookie had about 70 calories. Now every time I'm on the elliptical I think about those blasted cookies, and they just don't taste as good. I just breezed by the cookie aisle last time I was shopping. Voila! I'm serious about this - it is so infinitely much easier to not eat the dumb calories in the first place.