Social Workout

Scientific

If You're Counting Calories, Food Order Matters

Americans are notoriously bad at accurately estimating the calories in their food (last we checked, only 12% of the population was even in the calorie estimation ballpark). Well, turns out we get even worse when there's more than one food to consider. If you ask people to guess how many calories are in a cheeseburger, they say 570. If you show them a salad first and then ask, they revise to say 787. The "virtuous" salad makes people view the "sinful" burger differently. But here's the trouble, show people a burger, and then show them cheesecake, and you get the opposite effect. With no "virtuous" food in the picture, people estimate a lower total calorie content for the burger/cheesecake combo than they do for the salad/burger combo. Lesson for you: If you're counting, you might want to start with a salad reality check.

Tracking

My Favorite Sites (Other Than Social Workout!) For Internet Sweat

Feel like obsessing about your fitness, weight, lack of direction in life while you should be doing something productive for society and/or your boss? Have I got some sites for you. The interwebs is a magical place full of little nuggets of self-improvement obsession and time wasting.  From ExerciseFriends (like internet dating, but more immediately sweaty) to Dailyplate (where you can stalk your meals and the meals of your friends), all of the below are gratis, because the internet is best when it's free (I'm still mourning the early days of Napster).

Holiday Polls

Walking Off the Feast

Holiday statistical from jolly old England: Your typical festive Brit eats three times as much on Christmas as he or she does on a normal day. Specifically, one quarter of Brits — the feasting types we assume — will consume 6,000 calories on the day, as compared to a recommended daily allowance of 2,000 calories. This according to a poll sponsored by Sainsbury's a U.K. supermarket chain, which we expect is delighted by the numbers. Nothing wrong with the occasional feast, of course, but it does suggest the post-feast walk is a good idea.

Week 3: Tracking takes a nap

I don't actually have much to say about my food/workout/feeling tracker this week. I didn't push myself too much (except for boxing), but the numbers still went down. I seem to have eaten a little less, but I was still completely satisfied. Weight down 2 lbs, tape measure in an inch in a couple of places.

New York

Dedication and Derailment

Final Draft:

A review of the last week, and what I'm starting to think of as Riding the Crazy Train:

New York

Salsa Dancing

There is more then way to workout and you don't necessarily have to go to a gym to do it. So tonight I'm headed out with my girlfriends to go Salsa dancing. According to Glamour.com's calorie calculator - http://www.glamour.com/health-fitness/activity/calculators/salsa_dancing - I can burn 311.72 calories during 60 minutes of Salsa Dancing. And I usually dance for longer than 60 minutes.

New York

Practical Drinking

Wrong Reason, Right Champagne

Fit Sugar, bless their heart rate monitors, gives us the calorie low down on the champagnes we're likely to drink tonight. When encountering Grace Kelly at the bar as she sips her Taittinger, we recommend not bringing up the subject. But now you'll know that the average glass of champagne contains 91 calories, and that only suckers drink an average glass. Grace and the supermodel set go for the low calorie "extra dry" stuff.

Here's the key intel: "Look for bubbly with the word brut on the label. Brut is champagne speak for 'dry' and signifies a lower sugar content and a drier wine."

As I said, I recommend comprehensively ignoring the question, but this brut thing is good to know. "Dry" means "thin" to some, but says "less headache" to me.