Here it is.


washingtonpost.com
Exercise? Count on It


By Buzz McClain
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page HE01


Suppose there was a way to avoid all the bother involved in finding the time and the will to exercise. And imagine it required nothing more than toting up the calories spent in normal everyday activities and ensuring that they matched or exceeded the calories coming in. How many people out there would take that route instead of hitting the health club, pounding the pavement or grunting in front of the latest Pilates polka video? Let's see a show of hands. I thought so.

Could it be done? I set out to see.

As an experiment, I resolved to do nothing that smacked of purposeful exercise for nine days. That's right, Richard Simmons, nothing. No power walking, no getting friendly with a Nautilus machine, no yoga-robics, no daily workout besides the motion of normal activities. I decided to keep the exercise -- I mean, the calculation -- simple: Forget about fat calories, metabolic rates and all that; this was just subtracting the in from the out. There would be no dietary modification, either; my regular fare would suffice. The test, I thought -- somewhat wrongly, but more about that later -- would be to see whether balancing the input and the output would keep my weight constant. I'd prove that the power of arithmetic could overcome the problem of exercise!

The staying-still was going to be pretty easy, I figured: We're between rugby seasons, so my serious sports training is over with until spring. I have a tear in my right triceps, so weight lifting is on hold. There's no way I'm going jogging in winter; it's nasty out there. And don't remind me about the treadmill in the basement; that's for my wife, thank you.

So for nine days I tracked every morsel I consumed, my burn-off of nearly every calorie (okay, I didn't record bathroom breaks; some things remain sacred) -- and then, at the end of the day, I subtracted my caloric intake from my burn-off, or vice versa, depending on which was greater.

My three main tools were my bathroom scale (a genuine doctor's office variety called a Healthometer), a food scale for the kitchen and www.caloriesperhour.com, a Web site that calculates how many calories you can burn with virtually any activity a human is likely to engage in. Tell the site your height, weight, age and sex, and for any given activity it will spit out the approximate number of calories expended. For the record, I'm 6 feet tall and 48 years old and on the first day of the experiment I weighed 197 pounds.

Listmania


It was (sort of) fascinating to keep a running journal of my every waking minute, and also difficult: If you don't jot down what you do or consume right away, the memory begins to fade. I probably burned a lot of uncounted calories just keeping notes like "walk to Subway (100 yards), dodge car (three seconds), get ham and turkey sub (no mayo), Baked (not fried) Lays."

Over the course of the experiment, my daily average of 7.5 hours of sleep -- which burned 590 calories -- was usually followed by a morning routine of reading the paper in bed (52 calories in 35 minutes), showering (21 calories in seven minutes), shaving (12 calories in four minutes), grooming (12 calories), dressing (22 calories in five minutes) and walking through the house picking up stuff (eight calories in two minutes).

That's a total of 717 calories out.

Two cups of black coffee gave me 14 calories, and my toasted mini-bagel with an ounce of cream cheese added 170 calories.

That's 533 more calories out than in. Take that, Denise Austin.

After I get the kids off to school (packing lunches, checking homework, walking to and from the bus stop, talking with neighbors at bus stop, 134 calories), I get down to work in my home office, logging in for 2.5 hours at the computer for a burn of 335 calories. No late-morning snack for me; I drink good old municipal water just about continuously -- that's a big zero's worth of calories.

And that's 469 unanswered calories that have vanished. As I said, this was going to be easy.

Lunch preparation took 37 calories (for 10 minutes) and usually consisted of 2.5 cups of bagged salad (15 calories, ha!) and two ounces of blue cheese salad dressing (120 calories). My sandwich was usually two slices of Swiss (120 calories), five ounces of lean ham (228 calories) and teaspoon of yellow mustard (zilch) on four slices of whole wheat bread (320 calories).

Then there are the potato chips (150 calories). And the apple juice (120 calories). Lunch came to 1,073 calories in and 37 calories out. But wait, it took 60 calories to eat lunch -- I eat while standing -- so the net lunchtime intake is a mere 976 calories.

My mid-afternoon snack is usually some chocolate pilfered from one of the kids' Halloween baskets (120 calories). Then it's two hours of computer work (268 calories) and an hour of housework (also 268).

After walking to and from the bus stop (52 calories) and helping the kids with their homework (206 calories), I spend about 70 minutes preparing dinner (261 calories). The meal is generally a few ounces of low-fat protein, a warm vegetable, buttered bread and a salad with Italian dressing (about 680 calories, total).

Of course, all of this is washed down with wine. Two glasses, 140 calories total. After cleaning the kitchen (such is the fate of the stay-at-home dad; 51 calories), I kick back and read Bon Appetit for 35 minutes (52 calories) with two ounces of a nice Scotch (150 calories).

And then, to bed, where I eat up six calories taking off my clothes and putting on my jammies (two minutes), another six for brushing and flossing (no calories for toothpaste) and a whopping 19 calories for a moderate level of displays of affection for my wife.

The Envelope, Please


All of which all comes to . . . 2,347 calories going in and 2,472 going out, which means I'm running a deficit of 125 calories a day, or the equivalent of one Hostess Ho Ho (which has been known to sneak into the intake equation, but that's another story).

The 125-calorie daily shortage may explain why I didn't add body weight during my experiment. But when I ended my experiment, I weighed 194, three pounds less than when I started.

Clearly, it's a delicate balance. In my determination not to cheat on the calories-out side or my modesty (a pause here for guffaws from my friends) about divulging absolutely every fact of my life, could I have overlooked some sources of energy burning?

Undoubtedly so. According to my calorie log, there were various splurges in my diet and occasional variations in my routine that sent my weight ping-ponging from 197 to 195 to 197 again. For example, I flew to Denver and back for a business meeting. One way, that consumed 426 calories; on the other hand, the in-flight snack box gave me about 400 calories, and the bloody marys added another 210. Of course, you also have to factor in the calories required to stand in line, answer the no-I-didn't-let-anybody-go-through-my-bags questions, remove my shoes for the obligatory scan, pull all the coins, keys, lint and compromising personal items out of my pockets and put them in the plastic container, walk to the gate, stand baffled at the arrivals screen and wonder why my departing flight isn't listed there, etc. It all adds up.

One night I went to a nightclub, where I stood socializing for three hours (536 calories out) after driving to the club (179 calories round trip), and consumed two cans of beer (aka "hydraulic sandwiches," 360 calories in). One day I helped the school with kickball class (223 calories), on another day I played chess with my 6-year-old (67 calories and nearly got stalemated).

Two parties in Denver crushed my daily average: In 10 hours of socializing (1,787 calories) I drank 12 draft beers (2,160) and snacked on hotel goodies (who knows how many calories?). All I know is, my pants were tight in the thighs on the flight home.

So when I got back I skipped meals (zero calories) or snacked on whatever was open (usually salty fried things, never fruit; don't ask me why) to keep hunger at bay. The kids' Halloween candy is gone.

After six days sans exercise I was accused of being moody by my wife, who actually uses the treadmill. I sourly countered that she was inordinately cheerful because of the holidays. My kids wanted to play, but I wanted to sleep in. I couldn't make confident decisions and my reaction time was slow.

My Fat-al Flaw


But my weight didn't go up, so I got that going for me, right? I proved I don't need to exercise to stay healthy, right?

Wrong.

"You're not out on a ranch hauling hay and doing things like that?" asks Tammy Hischke when I tell her about my experiment. Hischke is a perky fitness instructor and coordinator of functional assessments (testing metabolic rates and the like) for the Cooper Fitness Center in Dallas.

Ranch? Um, no, I live in suburban Washington.

"Well, I would say you will maintain your weight for a short while" doing in-and-out math, "but not for the long haul. You'll start to gain weight."

But how? I'm not taking in any excess calories that can be stored as fat, so how will I put on pounds?

"You'll lose muscle mass, your metabolism will slow down," she says. "You gain a lot more things with exercise than just maintenance of weight. You get an increase in energy, an increase in metabolism; you decrease the chance of cardiovascular diseases; you get a reduction in blood pressure, things of that nature. If you don't work out, if you only consume as many calories as you burn, you're missing out on all that."

In other words, I'm missing my endorphins and adrenalin, the body chemicals that make me feel good? Isn't there a supplement I can take so I can get that stuff without exercise?

"I don't even know how to answer that," Hischke says, sounding shocked. And then, "Get on a treadmill!"

Maybe I will.•

Buzz McClain last wrote for the Health section about assisted breathing devices for those with sleep apnea.



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