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A Second Look at Exercise

I'll be a first time dad in the next week or two, and I'm already dealing with the time crunch and cheapo routine disruptive life events. Being a cheapo means improvising, so sometimes you need to rethink methodologies to adapt to changing circumstances.

My 9 month pregnant wife has been joining me on my dog walks in order to get some exercise herself, and she can't go as far as I can for as far along as she is. Also, she has a hankering for dining out more often than we normally do, so it adds a little more guesswork to my calorie estimates when my margins are already running pretty thin. Add in doctors appointments, chores and other prep tasks, and a lot of my extra time for walking is just vanishing. It's only going to get harder once this baby gets here.

It's my fault for allowing my weight to run away from me such that I'm in a position now to where I'm trying to lose a lot of weight quickly before the baby arrives. I'm losing weight steadily but only pound per week which is good but behind the rate that I wanted.

The good news is that Google Fit's calorie burn estimates seem to be pretty spot on, so I'm losing at exactly the rate that I expect. Google actually may be underestimating it a little bit, but that's the way you always want your fitness tracker to err. Your dashboard should always tell you the worst case scenario. If you were trying to lose weight slow and steady, it can be really demoralizing if your dashboard is saying you should be losing weight and you're not.

Fitbit's calorie burn estimates always seemed to run deceptively high. I think I was just running such huge calorie deficits during my initial plunge that I didn't really care that I was losing weight less rapidly than it would have predicted; I was just so thrilled that my formula was working to even notice. Well, I notice it now.

What I've found is that even when I'm racking up pretty decent step counts, it's really hard to get much above 2500 calorie burn days. I have a hard time eating much less than 2200 or so, so it appears that the only way I can really speed up the timetable is to add in high intensity exercise.

So, I've been doing some running. This past week I probably did about 15-18 miles. It's been bringing my calorie burn right up to around 3000, which will make a huge difference on the scale, and I'm already seeing it. My goal of getting back down to 158 before this baby arrives is out the window, but I should be able to get within 5 pounds of that if she doesn't show up for another week.

Looking ahead, there's no way I'm going to be able to walk my dogs like I used to with a newborn child, but running hasn't been so bad and really racks up the calories in a short period of time. Realistically, my days of lazily walking off the pounds are probably coming to an end to be replaced with diaper changes and jogging. So be it.

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