Running to Lose Weight

It seems that with all of the books, videos, and products promoted over the years for losing weight, Americans should be the most slender people on the planet; instead we are a progressively more obese population. Part of the problem is that those who create the books, videos, and weight loss products want to make money and the easier they make it look to lose weight the more likely it is that their product will sell, but with that, the more likely their product will be unsatisfactory.

I live in the running capital (Boulder) of the thinnest state (Colorado) of the United States where slender folks can be seen running on the bike paths, mountain trails, and road sides day and night all year long. It might be an easy conclusion to draw that running is a good way to lose weight and keep it off. I’m one of those runners. I’ve run over 4000 miles in the past three and a half years. A rough calculation would show that I’ve run enough to lose or keep off about 115 pounds. Have I lost 115 pounds? No, I weigh about 10 pounds less than I did three and a half years ago. Does that mean I would weigh 115 pounds more if I hadn’t run those miles? I hope not, although I do see lots of shoppers at Costco and Walmart who could stand to lose a hundred pounds or so.

My experience and observation is that it comes down to some simple math. It takes energy for the human body to function and move around. That energy comes from the food and drinks we consume. If we take in more than required, the energy is stored as fat, and if we take in less than is required we burn some of the fat we have stored. My wife and I have lost about 20 pounds combined in the past three months by obeying the simple rule that is suggested here. She has lost more than I have and she has not run, while I have run a few hundred miles during that time. How does this work?

You can do a web search for a Basal Metabolic Rate calculator. You will need to input your weight, height, age, and gender. This will tell you how many calories you need to maintain your weight if you were to just stay in bed or lounge on the couch for 24 hours a day. Most people are a bit more active than this so you will need to multiply your BMR by a factor based on how active you are. The website that has the calculator should also suggest the factors based on your level of activity. I chose a factor for a relatively sedentary lifestyle for my wife and me. If we had physically demanding jobs such as landscaping or construction work we would be able to multiply by a larger factor allowing us a higher calorie intake, but we’re teachers so we’re sedentary. So let’s say your BMR is 1750 and you have a relatively sedentary life, you multiply 1750 times 1.2 and get 2100. That would be the number of calories you could eat in a day and not gain or lose weight.

We found that it’s hard to stay motivated to lose weight if you can’t see some measurable progress in a reasonable amount of time, but it’s also difficult to function well if you limit yourself too much. A pound of fat contains about 3500 calories. If you can eat 500 calories a day less than the calories you need those 500 calories will come from the fat you have stored on your body. If you do that for a week you will lose a pound. We found that this is a reasonable balance. How much food is 1600 calories? It’s not a lot, but if you choose your foods wisely, it is enough. You will not want to waste those calories on a bag of potato chips or a soda. You will want foods that satisfy hunger, provide energy, and provide your nutritional needs. You will find it very difficult to eat at restaurants and meet your target; I would suggest preparing all your own food. Two of the hardest, but necessary, parts to losing weight are changing behavior and keeping track of everything you consume. You will need to keep track of everything you eat and add it up so you can see for yourself what you can eat. Fortunately products are labeled with the necessary information. Often the best foods to eat aren’t labeled, such as fresh vegetables, fruits, and grains, but you can easily look this information up on the Internet.

 Where does running fit in? Moving your weight over some distance that is outside of what would be considered normal in a sedentary life will require additional calories. Since 1600 calories is about as low as a person should go, you will need to eat more (a good thing) if you walk or run any significant distance. Moving your weight over a distance will require additional calories. Doing it faster will take less time and require more calories but not a lot more. To determine how much extra you can eat because you’ve run or walked a given distance, do the following calculation. For walking, multiple your weight times .57 times the distance in miles. If you weigh 170 pounds you would burn 170 x .57 x 3 = 290 calories. If you run, you should use .72 as your factor: 170 x .72 x 3 = 367 calories. The difference is not great, so it is not critical to run. The plus with running is that you cover the distance in less time and your body benefits from an elevated calorie burn even after you have stopped. If you want to make the math easy and be on the safe side, just use 100 calories per mile and use that as how much extra you can eat.

The reason I didn’t lose 115 pounds is because I ate to fuel my body to run all those miles, and if I had lost 115 pounds I would now only weigh 65 pounds, not a healthy weight for a 6 ft. tall human male. The point here is that running will not magically make you lose weight; in fact, running can cause weight gain if the person doesn’t pay attention to total calories consumed. Exercise can increase your appetite to the point that you eat more than you should.

What should you eat? How should you proceed? I think it is best if you take control of things yourself. Be in charge; don’t depend on a product or prepackaged meals that do it all for you. As I mentioned, find foods that are satisfying. Legumes, such as bean and lentils are filling, provide protein and other good things without being high in calories. My wife starts almost every day with a couple of eggs which she finds satisfying and are very nutritious. It is amazing how few calories are in vegetables; you could almost eat as much as you want of vegetables. They are great sources for necessary vitamin, minerals, and other nutrients. I avoid cheese, butter, and most oils. Their calories add up quickly. The calories from breads, pastas, potatoes, and rice can add up quickly. I try not to eat them unless I run the miles to burn them off. Juices typically have lots of calories; it is better to eat the fruit and drink lots of water. Meat, poultry, and fish are satisfying and are good sources of protein and other nutrients. I rarely eat meat or poultry; I prefer textured soy products such as Gimme Lean or Tofurky products. For so many of us, food is a reward or a source of daily pleasure. It can still be a pleasure, but not such a decadent one. A small piece of dark chocolate can be a nice daily treat. You may even want to choose one day a week to break from your new regular eating routine.

So, eat 500 calories a day less than you need to support a sedentary lifestyle and add 100 calories per mile that you walk or run. Don’t count the walking you do shopping at the mall or around the office; you should just count what you do that is specifically extra to burn calories. If you are not ready for running, just walk. At some point you may want to add in a one minute jog here and there. If you more than 20 pounds overweight, running can put a lot of stress on your feet. Walking fast can almost burn as much as a slow run. Running mountain trails, I often come across hikers that are difficult to catch up to or pass. If you eventually do start running, keep it slow. Run a pace that you can maintain, one that you can talk with someone without having to take breaths between each word.

Buy American, or not

My wife and I stopped at a thrift store last week to see what movies we could find on VHS for our four year old. We picked up E.T. and The Jungle Book and on the way out Elliott found a box of Play-Doh molds and tools for three dollars that he couldn’t live with out so we brought that home as well.

 Elliott discovered he only had one tub of Play-Doh left that he hadn’t turned into snakes and balls or let dry out in other undefined forms so Ruth promised to get him more Play-Doh when we passed by Hobby Lobby on the way home. I would have thought Hobby Lobby carried Play-Doh. They don’t, but they carry Kiddie Dough. At home, Ruth helped Elliott with the packaging and noticed that when Elliott started to play with the stuff it was sticking to his hands like green pizza dough with too much water. She thought maybe there was something wrong with the green so she tried the other colors; nope, they were a sticky paste just like the green. My daughter Googled “Kiddie Dough” and discovered broad dissatisfaction with the product. I took a look at labeling on the box; it was a Chinese product made in China by a Chinese company.

Ruth and I operate a vending cart where we sell inexpensive handmade jewelry and accessories. We make a lot of the handicrafts ourselves, resell some items made by local artists, and buy imported handiwork as well. We have an opportunity to get a sense of the general public’s attitude toward imports compared to American-made products. Many people like buying hand crafts from the person who created them, but others don’t care; if they want something, they’ll buy it without considering its origin. Very few are the people who have rejected an item because it was handcrafted overseas.

 As consumers, we shouldn’t be uncaring about where the products we purchase are made and we shouldn’t be so isolationist and naïve that we think everything we buy can or must be produced in the United States. We should at least give some consideration to the origin of a product when we buy it. I would say if you have the money to support the American worker when you make a purchase to go ahead and do it. I would also say to not buy a cheap Chinese knock off of a longstanding American product like Play-Doh. If Hasbro decides to have its Play-Doh produced in China to its specifications, the decision to purchase it becomes a bit more complicated. Most of your dollar for the product probably stays in the United States. It goes to pay for the heat and lights of the store where you bought it; a portion of it covers store clerk salaries, shipping, other overhead, advertising, profits for shareholders in an American company, etc. At most, a few pennies of that dollar go to China. Some of those pennies probably even come back to the United States to purchase products made in America.

At our cart we sell a beautifully hand-beaded necklace from Guatemala for $12.00. I’ve had people who do beading stop at the cart marvel at the work and say if they were to make such a piece they’d have to sell it for $80 to cover their time which means a store would have to sell it for around $150 or so. The necklace is nice, but I can’t imagine anyone forking over $150 for it. The person who produced the piece in Guatemala most likely receives less for the piece than the sales tax on the $12.00. He or she is at least able to eat and purchase other basic needs that might not be possible to buy if the necklace couldn’t be brought to market at a price people would be willing to pay. Again, I wouldn’t begrudge a few cents leaving the country in return for the amount of commerce it creates at home and to allow a family in another country to at least subsist it might not otherwise have an income.

There are many products we buy that have greater utility than a bead necklace. Let’s consider an iron. My household doesn’t iron much any more, but it seems we have to buy an iron every couple of years. We’ve tried various brands and features with prices ranging from $15 to over $100; most have them failed long before they should have and  we wished others would have failed because of problems we had with them. Our current one often snags the clothes on its trailing edge, has a setting dial that is very hard to turn, and will randomly leave a trail of water on the clothes that has to be ironed over to evaporate. If the irons were made in the United States, I don’t think it would make any difference; wherever they are produced they are being made to the specifications of American product engineers. We have the same issue with toasters. My grandparents had the same toaster all of their adult life and throughout their retirement, and they made toast every day. We’ve gone through several toasters that seem to start failing soon after we take them out of the box. On all these types of products, paying a higher price doesn’t mean it is higher quality, it just means there are more features that will eventually fail. I’d pay triple the price if the company could say it’s the last one I’ll ever need to buy and it is going to work just how it should. These products are designed so that we have to keep replacing them. Assembling them in China just makes it easier for us to keep doing it. We don’t complain so much if we have to go out and buy another $30 toaster, but if the same toaster were made in the US and cost $90 we would rebel.

 I personally avoid buying most food products from China. All those unregulated factories keeping costs down are polluting the air, the water, and the soil. I’d like my apple sauce to be made from apples grown in Washington or Michigan instead of the Yangtze River basin. I don’t know what possessed me to buy frozen salmon in Walmart once but since I noticed it was from China I’ve left it in the freezer, now taking up space for several months.

We live in a global economy and if we want a global market for our products we need to be willing to buy from other countries. I suppose we could refuse to buy any foreign products but I surely the result supply and demand for the hand to produce them would drive the prices up incredibly; we’d probably all have to stop our loftier pursuits and get a job on an assembly line because we wouldn’t have enough hands to produce all the things we buy. So, I would think twice before buying, willy-nilly, fake Americana knick-knacks or Kiddie Dough from Hobby Lobby; we don’t need that crap. I don’t want to pay $2000 for an iphone; I’m OK with it being made in Longhua. I don’t want to have to get a second job on the toaster assembly line because we don’t have enough people to make them. I’d like to think that as a nation we’ve progressed beyond competing for mindless low-wage assembly jobs. Maybe someday, those jobs will come back, but that will when China and India have moved past us and we become their cheap labor. We already have to bring in scientists, engineers, professors, and doctors from other countries because we aren’t educating our citizens well enough to take those jobs. We should be educating our population for middle or upper tier careers, not lamenting the loss of the bottom tier drudgery.

 The toaster, iron, or computer speakers are inexpensive because they are made in China; they’re cheap and disposable because American companies design them to be that way. If we want the products to be better we need to boycott them by not handing our money over to buy them, not because they’re made in China but because they’re designed to be junk. Meanwhile, I need to mix together some flour, water, salt, and food coloring to make Elliott’s play-doh.

Losing a Child to Texting and Driving

Ruth and I have three kids. The oldest, Alex, drove from Dallas to Phoenix yesterday for work, in the new SUV his employer had just bought for him. Our eighteen year old daughter Valerie tiptoed into the house at 2:19 this morning. And our afterthought, who at four years old has aptly renamed himself "Sonic" after the speedy energetic cartoon hedgehog, and requires that we still keep foam taped around the corners of the pointy furniture, is fortunately still asleep so I can begin to write this.

Some situations, like a thousand miles drive in one day, inherently raise enough red flags that we'll caution our kids of all the potential perils we can anticipate; if you're sleepy, stop and rest, don't follow too close, don't dawdle in El Paso, don't text while driving, sun glare could be an issue toward sunset, use your cruise control, etc. One's daughter being a passenger in a teenage boy's car on a Saturday night can make it hard to get to sleep. Make sure you driver looks both ways before crossing 287 even though the light is green, watch out for drunks on the road, don't hurry to get anywhere, and on and on. I try to limit my words of caution, hoping they exercise their own good judgment and also thinking that if I say too much they'll tune me out. But they still even need to be reminded to brush their teeth, so I persist. Both of them obliged me by dutifully accepting the cautions, today. Today, I didn't get the "yes dad, OK dad, enough dad". And today I didn’t remain silent. For once they understood my concern; the reality of the dangers had just hit too close to home.

When Valerie was in second grade she quickly became best friends with a new girl at her school. It seemed they recognized a kinship in one another. At that age they looked alike and acted alike. And although in Ruth's family the kids weren't allowed to andar de casera, Valerie soon had play dates at Chloe's house and before long, after getting to know the parents, we were even comfortable with her going there for sleepovers. I looked forward to picking up Valerie at Chloe's house just for the few minutes of conversation with the parents, with whom I also felt a kinship. Happy, rational, and considerate parents raise happy, rational,  considerate children. Chloe and Valerie would always take advantage of our free association conversations to have another twenty minutes or more of play together.

It was easy to allow a sleepover there. Steve and Sharon were balanced, experienced, tuned-in people. They retired rather young, I presume for having done everything right, and weighed their choices of the best places in the country to raise a family. Once deciding on Boulder, they researched schools and bought a house in the neighborhood of the highest rated elementary school in the district. Our kids went there because the school was not far from the apartments we happened to live in at the time Alex started kindergarten; although Steve and I were close in age, I was barely embarking on a career after years of aimlessness while he was enjoying stay-at-home parenting. A few years later, Alex started going with Valerie to their house to play a fantasy game the girls had invented with Chloe's older brother Alex, who was the same age as our Alex and a gentle and sweet soul that Ruth imagined one day as a suitable boyfriend for Valerie. The game somehow incorporated every game piece from every game they ever owned, every figurine, toy vehicle, block, Lego, etc. that the four kids had accumulated since their infancy. It was such a beautiful innocence contrasted to the hardened early teens I see at the alternative school where I work, some of whom may have already wrestled with drug addiction, experience unspoken abuses, given birth, been abandoned, etc.

Valerie and Chloe continued on to the same middle school, but logistics and interests would take them to high schools that were in opposite directions, and the bonds weakened. They continued to stay aware of each others' lives to some extent through occasional texts and Facebook postings, but the magical childhood was over. I missed the easy engaging friendship with the parents. Ruth and I often mention that we should give them a call, but between work, extra work, house and yard work, and chasing "Sonic" around it always becomes something that doesn't get followed through on. Ruth has run into them a couple of times and it's the same with them; they've wanted to reach out to us too.

Three days ago Sharon did call us; their Alex had been killed in an auto accident. He was texting, drifted into the oncoming lane, over-corrected and the car flipped. We are deeply anguished, for Alex's loss of himself, for his family's loss, for the loss of a sweet child that we knew. I feel a certain survivor's guilt knowing that it could have just as easily been our Alex, who I'm sure, has answered an inane text while behind the wheel and just happened to have the good fortune of not having compounding circumstances leading to catastrophe. A photo of their Alex's iphone with his last brief text, unfinished in mid-word appeared in the newspaper, on television, and in social media. Steve and Sharon, caring people that they are, wanted to increase awareness of the danger of texting and driving. They let the image be seen, hoping to save the lives of others and the grief and pain that they will feel forever.

A life may already have been saved; I may not have been compelled to call our Alex with words of caution, risking him feel like I treat him as I might his four year old brother. There are high-risk activities such as drinking and driving or street racing that are dangerous, and seem dangerous that responsible kids won't do. The other day I heard that one quarter of either auto accidents or auto fatalities (I don't recall which) are now attributed to cell phone distraction. Part of the problem is that while driving at excessive speeds and drinking and driving clearly are dangerous, driving and using a cell phone doesn't seem that dangerous. Driving a car can seem fairly easy once one gets the hang of it; basically, you sit there with your hand on the wheel barely moving it. Talking on a cell phone or texting are simple activities. Kids and adults do it all day long; a cell phone seems like an extension of a young person's hand these days. Combined, these two simple activities become a danger greater than drinking and driving or street racing, because unlike those activities which are clearly dangerous, there is an illusion of the absence of danger, which makes it even more dangerous. My son could be at a friend's house, offer to buy some soft drinks, and on the quick trip to the 7-11 receive a text while the phone is on the seat next to him asking him to pick up some chips too, glance at it briefly while covering 60 or 70 feet not looking at the road, and even more distance while answering, "sure, no problem". Nothing happens, but it's Russian roulette. Alex may accept my words of caution before a long trip, but I can't warn him every time I think he may make a quick trip to the store. It's also difficult to convince him child not to play Russian roulette with a gun he perceives as unloaded, as not even a gun, reinforced by the fact that every time he's pulled the trigger nothing has happened. I want my 22 year old to learn from his own experiences, but I want him to learn and live. I may have modeled undistracted driving to him, but I probably modeled distracted driving as well. Reminding him not to text and drive, (and I don't really know if it's something he's done or would do or does) probably has the same impact of all the times I’ve said, "you might want a jacket." The texting-while-driving “gun” shouldn't have to kill a childhood friend for one to not pull the trigger.

Our mirror family, as Alex referred to our friends, is suffering immensely at the loss of a precious member. We are suffering with them, for them. We all also recognize that the loss of their son, their brother, is the loss of our son, our daughter's brother, and for our son, himself. We harbor the guilt of survivors. We know that the happiest people we knew, the best parents we know, the parents any couple could look to as a model to be, the family that my son saw as our mirror family, will now always carry an emptiness that can never be filled and broken hearts that will never mend, could easily have been us, could easily still be us.

This post was written about five weeks ago. Every day I think of our friends and the image of their precious son as I remember him, and it grieves me think how they wake up every morning to their child still not being there, how the daily routine must seem so insignificant, and how falling asleep must be a time of profound loneliness.

Let me think about that

I've maintained a blog, now with a couple of hundred post, focused on running for a handful of years, and although I will continue exploring nuances regarding running, I feel compelled to address issues of wider concern.

Last week I was running with a local group of trail runners and as we ascended a foothills trail we came to a point where we could see ahead in the distance what appeared to be yellow flowers planted in the shape of the letter C. We had some fun speculating on the reason and as we progressed up the trail the letter C gradually disappeared. Nearing the flowers we found ourselves in the middle of a hillside surrounding by yellow wildflowers growing in a random pattern of varying density.

There is a bumper sticker that says "Don't believe everything you think". Too often our minds are made up and we only accept information that supports our viewpoint. I hope this blog will be akin to thinking aloud; I may not arrive at a definitive answer, but I hope to make some points and raise some questions. I may discuss a timeless controversy or a momentary triviality.