Slow-Carb Morning Test-Drive

I'm doing a little slow-carb test-drive this morning. I can't do the whole day, because I've already planned meat loaf and mashed potatoes for dinner tonight, and left-over pasta for lunch, but I figured I'd give a slow-carb breakfast a try. So I've gotten up this morning, no coffee, and I've eaten breakfast within an hour of waking up.

My slow-carb breakfast this morning was:

2 eggs, fried (100 grams)
15 grams of bacon (would've had more, but that was half of what I've got left)
140 grams of brown lentils
10 grams of onion
50 grams of frozen spinach

Basically, I diced the bacon and threw it in a frying pan, cooked it for a few minutes than added the chopped onion. After a couple of minutes, I dumped in the half can of lentils and the frozen spinach. Cooked it all until the spinach had defrosted and warmed up, then dumped it in a bowl. Cleaned the pan, fried two eggs (sunny side up), then dumped them in the bowl on top of the lentils. I was planning to add a bit of salsa, but it turns out we don't have any. Bummer. Oh well, it was still pretty good. Would've been better with the salsa.

I've entered the meal into Calorie King, SparkPeople and Weight Watchers, and according to them, this is the breakdown:

11 ProPoints (out of a daily allowance of 66)

407 cals (SparkPeople says 468)
23.6 g fat (54% of calories) (SparkPeople says 23 g for 44.6%)
6.1 g sat fat
506 mg cholesterol (SparkPeople says 470mg)
29.8 g protein (30% calories) (SparkPeople says 33 g for 27.6%)
15 g carb (15% calories) (SparkPeople says 33 g for 27.8%)
1.8 g sugar
6.7 g fibre (SparkPeople says 13)

I also drank 500 ml of water.

And now I've just finished a 15 minute session on the bastard of a cross-trainer. 4.5 km (2.8 miles) in total, and the first 3k in 9:55. According to RunKeeper, I've already burned up all the calories I had for breakfast, plus some (697 calories burned). That seems high, and WeightWatchers, SparkPeople, and CalorieKing all have very different numbers (6 ProPoints, 317 and 258 calories). Those are much more in line with what I was expecting, so I'll keep all those numbers in mind, while recognizing that distance is one piece of info that RunKeeper takes into account that the others don't. For now, I think I'll consider it a 300 calorie burn.

Also, I drank another 500 ml of water.

And unless I've had a late breakfast, I normally have  a snack around now (10 am), but after that breakfast, I'm not at all hungry.

Feel the Burn - Calculating Calorie Expenditure

I wanted to get an idea of the number of calories I'm burning while I'm on that bastard of a cross-trainer. I know that whatever number I get, it's not likely to be all that accurate, and I also know that the number of calories burned when I'm not exercising is much more important than the number I'm burning when I am. But still, I'd like to have a number, even if it's not all that accurate. And since I've been doing Weight Watchers for a year, and working in Points instead of calories, I really had no idea. So I checked a couple of different sources, and got a different numbers for all of them.

First, I worked it out myself, based on an equation that is if not the same, then at least very similar to the one I learned back when I was taking a fitness class at the University of Houston. According to that formula, my 35 minutes on the elliptical burned 643.125 calories, which I'm rounding to 640.

Then I went to CalorieKing, a site I've been using for years. It said 602, which I'm rounding to 600.

At SparkPeople, a site I joined a year or so ago and never really did much with, it says 740.

And my RunKeeper app says it's 679 calories, which I'm rounding to 680.

That's a pretty big spread, but it averages out at 665, which puts RunKeeper the closest to the average, so for now I think I'll go with that. If that's anywhere close to right, then with a resting metabolic rate of around 3000 cals a day, I should end up with a pretty significant calorie deficiency each day. If I get through the week, and if this works the way it's supposed to, I should see at least a kg of weight-loss for the first week.

I was losing more than that each week when I first started Weight Watchers, so I'm hoping for something a bit more radical, but a kilo ain't nothing to sneeze at, and I'll be looking at other things in addition to weight-loss.