Burn 500 Calories Now!

By: Susan Howard

BURN  500 CALORIES NOW!

After over a decade of touting the benefits of working out for weight loss, I have come to realize that, unless you watch your diet, true weight loss will be an uphill battle.

Diet. I hate that word and I hope I am never on one.

As I use it here, I merely mean “calories in.”

Here’s why just exercise won’t work:

I’ll bet you aren’t going to celebrate finishing a big project at work by running a half marathon with your colleagues, but you might go to happy hour at TGI Fridays and slurp down three strawberry margaritas -1150 calories. (Many of their entrée items tip the 1000 calorie scale as well.)

In the middle of a huge fight with your significant other, you aren’t likely going to go on a 50-mile bike ride to console yourself, but you may eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk -1200 calories.

If you are feeling bored, lonely, tired, or any other emotion really, you probably won’t swim five miles, but you may very well eat a plate of chicken nachos at Baja Fresh -coming in at a whopping 2020 calories.

Point being this: it’s easier to unconsciously consume a large amount of calories, but likely you won’t accidentally burn a bunch. You aren’t going to turn around and say oh shit I just hiked for five hours; I was so angry, how’d that happen?

With restaurants and fast food chains serving such hugely portioned, high caloric fare, nobody’s got your back. (But me of course.) We as a nation are more obsessed with thinness, yet we are fatter than ever and growing. With Venti Cookie Frappuccinos coming in at 800 calories, Starbucks has become a malt shop disguised in a coffee suit.

The next time you are bummed out, down and out, out and about, falling down that slippery slope of food hell, grab a number and do a triathlon instead. Remember you got to pay to play.

How much should you eat in a day? Daily, women can take in about 1600 to 1900 calories and dudes should have about 1800 to 2200. This all depends on size and activity levels.  How do I burn 500 calories, you ask? Don’t take them in. (If you do it will cost you one hour running on the treadmill.) There, they are gone.

WORKOUT

Take a 30 minute walk after dinner, with your family, or a friend. You will digest your food better and it will set a great example for your kids. Make it a nightly ritual.

Red Pee

By: Susan Howard

I woke to red pee.

It’s the morning of my first juice cleanse day and I am already peeing red.  I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to last the full three days, so during the pre-cleanse phase not only did I omit coffee, but I did a few trial runs with carrot beet juice.  Thus the pee.  It took me a second to realize it though.  Imagine.

Day One, I am having conversations with myself about food and if I ever really liked it in the first place, all that chewing and digesting, who needs it, so 80’s.  I am hanging on to this mantra like a thin fraying rope.

The bottles are super pretty, and I, like any good American, am a sucker for good packaging.

Juice one tastes good, but is green in color, sort of weird in the am.

Pee two: red as well, plus a poop, normal looking.

I wish I could eat even a cracker.

More juice, more pee.  Pineapple, apple mint juice is a treat that I enjoy at dinner time.

My pee is clear now, the kind of clear that looks like the toilet water.  No yellow at all.

It’s 7:30 pm on Day One and I still have 3 juices left to drink!  I am strangely determined to drink each one and to follow the program as closely as possible.  Instead of little sips, I am aggressively gulping down the final drinks.  One that was really looming: the chlorophyll H2O -a bright green water -actually doesn’t taste like the sea sludge I was expecting; in fact it doesn’t taste like much.

Ya know how when you do something really hard like sprinting up a hill, you don’t realize how hard it is until you stop, then it hits you and immediately you gasp for breath?  That’s what gulping these juices is like.   I can drink them down okay, it’s the aftermath that really gets me.

There is an almond milk juice that is my final one.  I am really looking forward to it.  At least that is something that sounds like something.

The conversations about the lack of necessity food has have ceased.

One last note: I pooped red.  I wonder if the Russians have the same problem. I will have to ask my friend Boris.