One of the things I love about working out and working on fitness and health in the 21st century is the abundance of technological help available. It's especially good for someone like me, who lives far from the madding crowd. Or the stinky gym locker room. Whatever.
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| LoseIt!'s summary for last week. Some days are better than others, and I do have a tough time eating more than this. |
As I study the LoseIt! graphic, I wonder if I'm doing it wrong. I don't think I am. The final column should be as close to zero as possible, right? I realize I'm far below that on most days, but on the days I come close I really feel as though I've eaten too much. At my age, I don't need the same number of calories a 40- or 30-year-old needs. I'm assuming LoseIt! factors age into its recommendations.
I tried out the BMR calculator at fat2fitradio.com using my height, current weight, goal weight and four different ages, and the suggested calorie target is lower for each decade.
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| 62 years old, which is what I'll be on May 25. And don't you forget it! Heh. |
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| 32-year-old female. |
If I were 32, I could add another couple hundred calories per day and still lose weight, according to the calculator. I can guarantee I wasn't eating this much when I was 32. Thirty years ago we followed the guidelines in popular women's magazines that told us to eat 1200 calories a week, and offered menu plans with exciting lunches like "green salad topped with two ounces of tuna drained of oil." Okay, I'm making the lunch part up, but you get the idea.
At 42 (above, left) I would need to cut about a hundred calories a day, and at 52 (above, right) another hundred. (You can click on those tiny charts and they'll get bigger. I think.)
The chart I love getting every week is from dailymile:
And the lifetime wrap-up on the website is even better.
Just think if you'd started keeping these stats when you were running track in high school, and could look back and see how far around the world you've come when you hit your 60s. Ah, but no regrets for me. I'm just happy to be able to put one foot in front of the other on a daily basis. I'm not quite ready to sit down yet.
I'm not geeky enough to create my own spreadsheets in Excel, mostly because I think Excel is evil. I've been known to use spreadsheets in the past, however. The kind where you use graph paper and a pencil to record your progress. Because that's all we had, back in the day. You young whippersnappers probably don't know what graph paper is. Now take your ball and get off my lawn!
3 comments:
I thought you said you did not like to track anything. . .
I don't like to track anything, but until I get to a place where I'm comfortable with what I'm doing, I think it's important that I do it, whether I like it or not. That said, tracking with the help of technology takes some of the sting out, and the dailymile weekly wrap-up, especially, will keep me logging my miles for a long time. Maybe the rest of my life.
I think you have to keep in mind that even with modern tracking, a lot of this is still estimation. Such as BMR, how much you "should" be eating, and how many calories were actually burned during an activity. So it's helpful as a rough guideline, but I wouldn't be too concerned about hitting Zero each day!
More than one expert says that metabolism or caloric need does not decline automatically with age, but that it declines with decreased muscle mass, which can be prevented. I know you probably don't want to hear that :-)
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