What does 200 calories look like?

I had a revalation about why fad diets don't work the other day and then it was gone.  For the life of me, I can't remember what happened in that moment of clarity.  I have been thinking a lot about this article my friend posted about obesity and economic environments.  We have all increased in BMI over the past 26 years.  That means all genders, all races, all ages.  If you take a look at the graph here, it may be easy to see why.  We are simply intaking more calories.

I've written before about my own personal adventures in big data and fitness analytics.  From my own study on myself I found that 200 calories out (fitness) per day makes me maintain my current weight.  NOT burning 200 calories per day makes me gain weight.  So I asked myself if I really know what 200 calories looks like.  From the graph above, it looks more like we're eating something like 600 calories too many.  So what does that look like?  I've also been thinking about dog food.  Why do we need our food to taste good?  I mean, it's ridiculous to think we would only eat a big pile of broccoli, but dogs eat a homogenized pile of kibbles and they seem to survive.  Do we really need cupcakes, doughnuts, french fries, hamburgers and burritos?  

So that's only half the story (energy in). The other half is what we do (energy out). All guidelines suggest 150 minutes of aerobic exercise per week. Benefits include lower risk of premature death, coronary heart disease, stroke, hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and depression. Additional benefits are gained by 300 and 450 minutes per week. A person who does 300 minutes a week has an even lower risk of heart disease or diabetes than a person who does 150 minutes a week. A person who does 420 minutes (7 hours) a week has an even lower risk of premature death than a person who does 150 to 300 minutes a week.

At some point I read an article that 10 minutes twice per day is sufficient to maintain weight, which is how I got so psyched about bicycle commuting.  It's an unavoidable way to get your cardio.  This summer, I've been driving to work every day to teach my 8am class and it's eliminated that part of my routine.  I haven't filled in the gap with other exercise like I thought I would.  I'm in the process of looking at my fitness data since 2009 and I wish there was a good application for data analysis of this type.  Personalized medicine involves getting people to look at their habits and see trends (both good and bad).

I recently met with a woman who made me laugh at how "science people" are convinced with numbers, graphs and trends while "humanities people" are convinced with thoughts and feelings articulated.  So I wonder if there would be a fitness app for touchy-feely types that would be less quantitative and more qualitative.  Emoticons!  I wonder if you can sort your workouts on MapMyRide by those which you felt the best...

MapMyRide used to have a feature where you could export your workout data in a spreadsheet (or at least a table containing links and calories.  I cut and pasted them here.  At some point (June 2012) you could no longer highlight your list of workouts.  I had to settle for screenshots after that.  So it's taking me a long time to transfer the data to a spreadsheet.  I just found a way to cut & paste it but you have to put your cursor in a weird place!  So that will be the topic of a new post.  I read that Big Data is defined as data so large that traditional spreadsheet software is ineffective at dealing with its size.  Right now I have a separate sheet devoted to each year but I plan to collate the data into one big sheet, catergorize the workouts and do some multivariate analysis.  More on that later.

References

http://www.tbd.com/pictures/2012/01/the-calories-in-a-cupcake-photos-/14517-1020.html January 06, 2012.

Sturm and An. Obesity and economic environments. CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians 22 May (2014) Early View (Online Version of Record published before inclusion in an issue)

http://blogs.plos.org/publichealth/2014/05/27/think-know-obesity-rates-rising-youre-probably-wrong/ via Samantha C. Lewis, Ph.D.

Janssen, et al. Years of Life Gained Due to Leisure-Time Physical Activity in the U.S. Am J Prev Med 2013; 44(1):23–29. http://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(12)00734-9/abstract