weight loss tips

[danaeris]

A friend just posted some weight loss tips in hir journal, and two of them are things I'd always been confused about before, because for me they contradict slightly. I was hoping someone here could clarify for me.

The are...
Eat upon waking
and
Exercise upon waking

Which should I do first? Currently, I get up, get dressed, brush teeth, drink some water, and head to work, which is a 20 minute walk, before eating. Breakfast at work is cheaper, bigger, and healthier ($2 for scrambled eggs, fruit salad, and bagels, or free milk to eat with your cereal). I thought this was the ideal for my health... wake up, exercise, and then eat. Do I have it backwards?

The only other thing in there that was new to me and helpful was the fact that apparently, drinking ice water burns calories. Lots of them. I like ice water. I'm sometimes bad about drinking it because of laziness. Clearly I should drink more water and make sure it is icy.

Comments

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

Here we go. I just checked the original post of the information. To raise water from ice to body temperature (about 32 degrees F to 98.6 degrees F) is about 66 degrees F, or roughly 37 degrees Celsius.

A half-gallon of water (8 8-oz glasses) is about a half-gallon. We'll say a gallon is 4 liters (roughly four quarts, which is what a gallon actually is) to make the math easier in a minute. A standard calorie is the heat to raise one cc of water by one degree C. A liter is 1000 ccs.

So 2 liters of water (half a 4-liter 'gallon') is 2000 ccs of water. 2000 ccs of water raised by 37 degrees C is 2000 * 37 standard calories, or 74,000 calories. A dietary calorie is a kilocalorie, or 1000 calories. So you burn 74 calories by drinking a half-gallon of water at 32.5 degrees Fahrenheit (and that's uncomfortably cold, at least for me).

The original assertion was that that was equal to the calories burned in jogging a mile. That's off, but not, like, an order of magnitude off.

[angelbob.livejournal.com]

A half-gallon of water [...] is about a half-gallon.

Sigh. Right. True, but silly.

[princeofwands.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

Depending on how hard I'm working, how fast I'm moving, and how precise I'm being about measuring my workout, I seem to have an upper sustainable caloric burn of almost 1 kCal/min. Estimates put my 6-min mile run between 60 and 100kCal depending more on duration than specifically intensity. Same order of magnitude, and lots of overlap ping real solution space.