Wut Fat Cowz Won’t Tell U

IMPROVE YOUR HEALTH AND WELLNESS – There are 4 simple keys of prevention that can help you choose healthier.

I know what you are saying…”Come on, Mr. No Fun! Lighten up! It’s one order of waffle fries on the weekend with your family. It can’t be that bad! Plus, I think God approves of them, because they are holy.”

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I agree! It is only an occasional meal for our family, but I think for some families it is a regular occurrence. Also, we have to remember that is ONE meal. Here is some perspective on what those numbers really mean. I am 39 years old, 5’11’’ and 185 pounds. There are many calculators you can use online like this one from Free Dieting to estimate your daily caloric needs. My maintenance level of daily calories to maintain my weight is 2600. I picked exercise 5 times per week, even though I hit it hard 2-3 times and then have several light sessions as I lead programs with clients. If you click no exercise, your requirements drop to around 2150. That would put the first meal at half of what you need for a full day!

Let’s use the Calories Burned Calculator now to look at what it would take to work these meals off. Let’s pick 6 different exercises from each category – Bicycling, Walking, Running, Swimming, Sports, and “At the Gym”. For each exercise, we will see what it takes to burn off the healthier meal (368 calories) in 45 minutes. We know that the unhealthy meal option has about 3 times as many calories (2.88 actually) so you would need three 45 minute sessions or we will offer a much harder option to burn the calories in just one 45 minute session. The following amounts are based on my stats (39 years old, 5’11’’, and 185 pounds)

1. BICYCLING – Enjoy that grilled chicken meal and with some light effort 10.0 to 11.9 miles per hour you can burn 395 calories in 45 minutes. Competitive mountain mountain bike racing gets you to only 930 calories in 45 minutes, still 130 short if you choose the higher fat and sugar option!

2. WALKING – climbing hills with no extra load would burn 366 calories in 45 minutes. That would be an enjoyable break in your busy day if you eat that healthier salad. Nothing came close in the walking section for one 45 minutes session to the 1060 calories you’ll pack-on from that fried meal. You’ll need to be a real mountain climber and carry at least 42 pounds while climbing hills for an hour and a half!

3. RUNNING – this section shows the most obvious difference in these meals. You could go for a very slow jog (4.0 miles per hour – 13 minute mile pace) for 45 minutes to work off the grilled chicken meal. To utilize the energy of the fried meal in 45 minutes, you need elite runner capabilities. Running 13 miles per hour (4.6 minute mile pace) burns approximately 1105 calories in 45 minutes.

4. SWIMMING – a fun, leisure swim burns off your light lunch option in 45 minutes (about 349 calories). Vigorous effort on a freestyle lap swimming burns about 570 calories. The butterfly burns 802 calories, so you would still have 258 calories left over from you fried chicken/ waffle fry combo. That’s 70% of the calories from the grilled chicken/salad combo! Better plan to do some open water lake swimming instead.

5. SPORTS – playing any of the following sports at a moderately competitive effort level for 45 minutes, will use the calories from our healthy meal – team volleyball, soccer, basketball, tennis (doubles and singles), racquetball, softball (if you are the pitcher). You will need to play for 3 hours if you want to burn off the fried chicken option. I hope you have good friends with an open schedule. If not you can always shoot a few hoops with Ken Minks or get some great tennis lessons with Brad Minns.

6. AT THE GYM – After your healthy meal, hit the gym and you will have no problem working it off with any of the following activities (349 calories in 45 minutes): Resistance Training (Weight Lifting, Free Weight, Nautilus Or Universal), Power Lifting Or Body Building, Vigorous Effort, Slow Or Explosive Effort = 349 calories in 45 minutes. You could also take a Faithfully Fit Aerobics Class , use a rowing machine at a steady pace, or jump rope for about 20 minutes. That means you need about an hour of jumping rope to work off the fried chicken meal! Try it…that will be an hour you will never forget!

That is a simple look at calories consumed and burned. What else can we learn from comparing these meals?

Let’s start with sodium. The Institute of Medicine recommends 1500mg. per day even though our bodies only need around 500mg. The unhealthy meal knocks that requirement out for the day, and the meal with a small amount of salad dressing is not far behind, unless you take our lemon/lime juice and pepper suggestion. The Center for Disease Control suggests that reducing our sodium intake would save about 400,000 lives annually due to the increased likelihood of heart disease and strokes from high blood pressure.

Next, let’s look at sugar. The American Heart Association (AHA) recommends 36 grams per day for men; 20 grams for women; and 12 grams for children. Meal #1 = 180% of the daily amount for men, 320% for women, and 540% for children! Meal #2 = 33% of the daily amount for men, 60% for women, and 100% for children. No wonder childhood obesity has doubled and tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years. Here is another disclaimer because the word “sugar” has many meanings and is very personal as to how your body uses it. Again, our focus here is simply to bring some awareness to food choices and consequences for your overall eating plan, goals, and success. When you eat foods that cause a steep rise in blood sugar, your body churns out a lot of insulin to “process” that blood sugar and get it out of the bloodstream and into cells. Over time, repeated floods of insulin make the body less sensitive to the hormone, leading to a condition called insulin resistance—and so the path to diabetes begins. Diabetes is the #7 leading cause of death in the US.

Would you like to make that large? Finally, let’s point out the most recent issue that comes up when discussing America’s growing obesity numbers…portion sizes! In this article we were looking at medium fries and lemonade. Most men I know that are my size or bigger — go large! The difference between a large lemonade and a medium one is 110 calories and 27 grams of sugar! For waffle fries, it equates to 130 more calories, 7 grams of fat, 50mg. of sodium, and 15 grams of carbohydrates.

So, what’s the long term impact of your eating choices and physical training commitments? And – in terms of your daily diet if it is a spiritual struggle for you then you must ask, as Frank Schaeffer once did in his film series How Should We Then Live, “Should we despair and give in?” The answer as it was then is still “no”.

Let’s take a bigger look at the numbers over the course of a week, and use my calorie numbers from above (2150 per day with no exercise, and 2600 per day for my typical exercise week). Let’s say I want to eat 4 meals a day. With no exercise, I can consume 15,050 (2150 x 7) calories in a week to maintain my current weight. If I eat our “unhealthy option” 3 times in a week and assume that the rest of my meals meet the criteria of the “healthy” meal, my Chick-fil-A diet results in 12,380 calories consumed per week. This reinforces the idea that not all calories are created equal. At first glance, I still have 2,670 calories to snack on, but remember what we said about sugar and sodium? The 3 unhealthy meals make up 80% of my recommended sugar intake for the entire week! If you only focused on the calories, rather than the source of the calories and the stats of the food we consume, you may be able to control your waist line, but you could be wrecking your heart, liver, and other organs that break down the other nutrients.

TIME TO EAT – A resource to help men take leadership at home in the area of food.

God has given you an incredible body remarkably capable to resist disease and be pain free and strong, but when you consistently pollute it with sugar, shock it with salt and engorge it with fat you are choosing to ignore the wisdom of God, disregard Him and his role in your life and subvert His grace. Yes, you have the freedom to choose what you will eat and how you’ll train. You’re going to live according to how you think. Pursue the wisdom of God and then act upon it.

If you have found this breakdown enlightening, please let us know. Live life to the fullest, even if that means having a waffle fry or two along the way. Just make sure to keep moving, and make smart choices most of the time!

Jason Rhymer, is the Training Department editor for Faith & Fitness Magazine. He is the president of Rhymer Fitness and a Z-Health Level IV Trainer. Drawing on science, faith, creativity and his personal fitness background, Jason meets the physical, spiritual and social needs of our readers. He leads Christian Fitness Bootcamps in Charlotte, NC. Learn about them at his Christian Strength Training website. CONTACT JASON with training questions or ideas for our Training Department.