Easy as Apple Pie

This morning the cats all scattered when Gretchen’s sister Sue came knocking on the door. It seems that she and her husband were drying apple slices and made more slices than would fit on their drying racks. She made two pies with the extras but still had apple slices left over so she decided to give them to Gretchen and I. Since we are not ones to waste food, we gladly accepted them. However, since we are both watching our weight we wanted to know, “How many calories are there in a slice of apple pie?” 



Well, I did a Google search for <a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Apple+Pie%22+calories&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8" title="Google Search: &quot;Apple Pie&quot; calories">&ldquo;Apple Pie&rdquo; and &ldquo;calories&rdquo;</a> and got about 35,200 hits. Just looking through the results from the first page, it looks like, depending on the recipe, the number of crusts, and the size of the slice, there are between 200 and 500 calories in a piece of apple pie. Since we do not want to gain any weight, we figured we would need to increase our level of activity to burn off those extra calories. I walk to burn calories. Gretchen cleans stalls. Walking burns about 100 calories per mile. That&rsquo;s between 2 and 5 miles of walking to work those calories off. I do not know how many stalls that corresponds to. <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/wink.png" height="18" width="18" alt=";-)" /> 



Needing to do something &ldquo;extra&rdquo; in order to work off the calories assumes that they are &ldquo;extra&rdquo; calories. In order to figure out how many calories you need &mdash; so you can know which ones are &ldquo;extra&rdquo; &mdash; you need to know your resting metabolic rate (<acronym title="Resting Metabolic Rate">RMR</acronym>). Sally Squires of the Lean Plate Club at <em>The Washington Post</em> has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&amp;node=&amp;contentId=A51010-2002Jan28&amp;notFound=true" title="Week 4: Every Calorie Counts (washingtonpost.com)">an article about RMR</a>. To calculate your RMR, you can use <a href="http://www.dallasdietitian.com/calcalc.htm">one of the online calculators</a>. This calculator will tell you how many calories you need to consume to maintain your current weight given your current activity level. <ins datetime="2003-12-09T15:16:00-05:00">According to the calculator, I need 2326 calories.</ins>



When you use the calculator, you have to specify your activity level. The trick here is if you consider an activity when including it in your activity level, you cannot count doing that activity when trying to figure how you are going to burn those extra calories. For instance, if you walk three miles a day you will burn 300 calories doing it. If you say that you have a moderate activity level in determining your RMR because you walk those three miles a day, then you can no longer say, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s OK for me to have that slice of apple pie because I walk three miles a day.&rdquo; You have to walk an <strong>extra</strong> three miles to work off the <strong>extra</strong> 300 calories from the pie. See how that works?



If you want to loose weight, you need to have a target weight to shoot for. You might want to choose this as a function of your body mass index (<acronym title="Body Mass Index">BMI</acronym>).  The Centers for Disease Control (<acronym title="Centers for Disease Control">CDC</acronym>) has <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/index.htm">a page about BMI</a>. The CDC say that a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9 is considered normal. According to their <a href="http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/bmi/calc-bmi.htm" title="BMI Calculators">online calculator</a>, at 5' 10" and 180 pounds when I started this exercise, mine was 25.8, so I was slightly overweight.



You can look at tables and figure out what they say your weight ought to be, but I found <a href="http://www.halls.md/ideal-weight/body.htm">a calculator</a> that looks up all the stuff for you, then it gives you a bunch of weights and weight ranges that reflect differing views about what an &ldquo;ideal&rdquo; weight ought to be. Mine are as follows: 

• 164 lbs – This shows the average weight that other people of my age, height, weight and gender would describe as their ideal weight. It is interesting to note that this is still about ten pounds over the medical average weight for me — see next.
• 132 to 174 lbs – This is the range from the BMI table for normal weight of my height. Medical evidence suggests that all body weights within this range are reasonably equally healthy. The center of the range is at 153.
• 154 to 167 lbs – This is the range that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company describes as my ideal weight range. The center of the range is at 160.5.
• 161 lbs – This is the weight that Dr. B. J. Devine indicates is normal for my height. This weight is sometimes used to determine dosage for medication. The implication being that if you are overweight, and your doctor is using the “Devine formula” you may be being under-medicated.
• 157 lbs – Same as above, but using Dr. J. D. Robinson’s formula.
• 155 lbs – Same as above, but using Dr. D. R. Miller’s formula.

So, what target did I pick? Well, I know myself and understand that I will loose interest and give up before I reach my goal, so I picked 155 as my target since it was very far away and I would end up somewhere in between. I’ll be thrilled if I can get to 160. 



So, now with all this calculating, I know my RMR, which tells me how may calories I need to maintain my current weight, my BMI, which tells me whether I am overweight, and I have a goal to shoot for. 



Now, before we go to the next step it is useful to know a little something about these scary calories we are trying to stay away from and that is, it takes 3500 calories to make a single pound of weight. That means, if you had an apple pie that consisted of ten, 350 calories slices, you would have to eat the whole pie to gain a single pound. Now that sounds outrageously difficult, but if you did it every day for a month — say around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years — you could easily gain 30 pounds. 



It works the same way in the other direction. You have to reduce your caloric intake by 3500 calories to loose a single pound. If you did your RMR above, you probably came up with a number that was well less than 3500 calories per day. That means you could fast completely one day a week, and still not loose a pound a week — which is the amount that is considered medically safe. 



Another point is activity level. Before this started, I was almost completely sedentary. When this started, I started walking. Walking a mile burns 100 calories. That means I would have to walk 35 miles to loose one pound. At three miles per hour — the average human walking speed — I would have to walk for almost 12 hours. That’s not going to happen. If I walk every day at lunch, I’m going to get in 5 hours, tops — assuming every day is nice enough to go for a walk. 



So, lets look at this last bit about calories again. If it is medically safe to loose one pound a week, and one pound is 3500 calories, then to loose one pound a week, I need to reduce my caloric intake by 500 calories a day (7 x 500 = 3500) &mdash; two slices of apple pie per day <img src="http://www.personal.psu.edu/staff/m/h/mhl100/images/smile.png" height="18" width="18" alt=":-)" />. Or I could increase my activity level by 500 calories a day. Or I could use some combination of reduced consumption and increased activity that totals 500 calories. If my starting weight was 180 and I want to get to 155, then I was 25 pounds over my target weight and if I planned to loose one pound per week, I need to stay on the diet for 25 weeks &mdash; so some <strong>patience</strong> is involved. Given that I will cheat over the holidays, I would guess that it will take more than 25 weeks. That is about six months.



Another thing to remember is that as I loose weight, my RMR will go down, so I&rsquo;ll need to reduce my caloric intake even more to continue loosing weight, but since I have that online calculator, it&rsquo;s easy to figure out how much. The idea being to keep my intake 500 calories less than the amount needed to maintain my weight, as indicated by my RMR &mdash; which is a function of my weight. 



So your thinking, &ldquo;How can you live on so little food? You can&rsquo;t maintain that diet forever.&rdquo; The thing is, it isn&rsquo;t forever. Once I reach my target weight, I get to go back to a maintenance diet, as indicated by my RMR, rather than a weight loss diet, which is 500 calories less than my RMR. For me for instance, there is only 200 calories &mdash; a slice of pie &mdash; difference between the maintenance diet at my current weight and my target weight. That is assuming I stop walking. If I continue walking, I can actually eat 450 calories more &mdash; a big slice of pie &mdash; than I did before. That&rsquo;s not really much of an imposition at all, and I think it is something I can live with by just using smaller portions and eating healthy once I reach my goal.