Moving snow the old fashioned way is a great exercise. Minute for minute it is one of the best winter exercises you can do – and it can be a great service as well.

On average here are the calories burned per minute shoveling snow. These are just averages that I could find on the net.

In some ways a comparison is more effecting than thinking of actual calories. Shoveling heavy snow is the most strenuous winter activity that I could find in calories burned per minute. Shoveling light snow was bested only by cross country skiing, downhill skiing, running 8 mph, and full court basketball.

On Saturday I spent about 3 hours shoveling around my neighborhood. It felt good to get out and do a little service. And at the end of the day (I had worked out to a movie as well that morning) I burned off over 7500 calories by these calculations! Not too shabby. I commented to Janille that I could feel myself getting skinner as the hours moved on. It was kind of funny, but I did feel like my clothes got loser as I went:)

Anyway, this is not something everyone should do. There are a ton of medical concerns that need to be taken into account. Not the least of which is the heart and back.

It is estimated that you are 3x more likely to have a heart attack while shoveling snow than just your normal risk factor. There are several reasons for this. The strenuous nature of the exercise is one, but the cold is another major factor. Cold constricts the blood vessels making it harder for the blog to pump as you engage in hard activities – hello heart attack.

It is also easy to get dehydrated. You will sweat a lot, but you may not notice that you have stopped sweating because your clothes will keep the moisture close to your body. So you feel hydrated when you really are not. 

So if you have a heart condition be very careful – maybe even get a snow blower until you get your heath under control.

If you do not have a heart condition – well – go out and do a little service. It will be great for your heart and your soul.

Be Healthy – Enjoy Life!

Matthew Stearmer

The last two weeks have been something else. I’ve barely been able to get a few miles in a week and that is way down from my regular goals. Basically my workour progress has just been a joke the last 2 weeks.

Now, I’m quite please with my diet all things considered. I have continued to eat smaller portions and that has helped. I’ve not gained back any weight, but I certainly have not made any progress. Oh well. I’ll have to be thankful for small blessing.

So now that I finally got back on the elliptical again it felt so good!

I don’t know why, when I need to exercise the most, I tend to do it the least. When I am stressed exercise is the best remedee for me. When I am tried, exercise helps me get back to better sleeping. When I am feeling overworked, exercise helps me to organize better. I know all of that, but for some reason I lose track of that when I am in the heat of the moment as it were.

So, with most of that behind me now Ill be moving on.

Be Healthy – Enjoy Life!

Matthew Stearmer

When surgery becomes the preferred method of weight loss we are in trouble. In this article from the New York Times doctors are suggesting that those with a Body Mass Index over 40 should have this elective surgery. I personal know what it feels like to have a BMI over 40. That is what I started at about 4 months ago now. So I am not being critical of something that I have no experience with. So hear me out on this if you have been considering a surgery to help with weight loss. In this article they state that I should have had surgery because I was over 40 on the BMI – clinically classified as morbidly obese. Now that obese part is true – but surgery! give me a break. This new procedure says that will help you lose 40% of the excess weight in 1 year – and that this is better than diet and exercise! Heck I have lost almost 75% of the 100+ lbs that I needed to lose and I did it in less than 4 months. So in a year they expect most people to have lost 1/2 as much weight. That just does not seem like a good plan to me After the surgery you have an increase risk of disease, hernia, staff infections etc. And there is a 1% chance of dying in surgery. Gee. Let me think. Sure let’s do that! Winning a slot machine in Las Vegas is a 1/250,000 change. And people think that is good odds – can you imagine 1/100! Do you really want to gamble with your life? Amazing. And at the end of the surgery – you took on all the risk and are no more healthy right after than you were before. Same habits, same lungs, same heart etc. It is all the same. So why not achieve an actual change and avoid the $25,000 surgery and the possibility of death. Personally I would rather really live. Kind of a random post, but important to consider I hope. Be Health – Enjoy Life! Matthew Stearmer

Weight loss in the winter time is always difficult to manage. But this winter I not going to put on any weight. In face to make this weight loss regime the hardest I possible could I managed to “schedule” my last 30 pounds to lose right during the holiday season.

Maybe not the best plan in the long run – but here we go.

On top of the holidays that constantly come up for the next 3 months it is also freezing cold here in Utah. So getting out and running gets a little harder. Not impossible mind you – but a little more challenging. Normally I would just get on my elliptical and put in a movie, but since I broke the right front wheel and the replancements are still coming I’m going to have to be a little creative.

Somewhat fortuitiously I came accross an article today in the New York Times on how jumping rope is coming back into weight loss style. After doing a little research I discovered that this is one of the hardest and best cario workouts that you can do indoors, and in one place no less. With more and more people living in small appartment and condos jumping rope becomes a natural weight loss regime.

This is how I am going to use it this weekend for my goals.

Friday is supposed to be a long work out day. It should not be too snowy until the evening, so I am going to leave an hour early for my research appointment so I can get that in before noon. I’m going to take a shirt to change into after that, so I look somewhat respectable for my meetings. That will give me about 4 miles before the meeting and time to stop sweating before any sees me. Then depending on the weather I any do another 2 miles on my way home.

Saturday I will do jump rope interval training. I’m going to jump for 3 minutes. Then rest for 1 minute while doing a combination of sit-ups, push-ups, and bicep curls. So each set will be 4 minutes long. I’m going to do 10 of them for a total of 40 minutes. That will get the heart pumping. I’ll take my pulse at the end of the first several 3 minute intervals so I can get a sense for who it compares to my elliptical exercises or regular wind sprints.

Sunday is going to be a long day as usual with all my church responsbilities. I never eat very well on these days. I normally try to go on a walk with the kids, but since it is supposed to be snowing I’m not sure we’ll be able to do that. So I will make sure that I walk around the church several times during the day. 10 Laps will be a mile. I’m going to try and get 20 laps in. I’m going to get there before my meetings on Sunday and do 6 laps. Then I will 2 after the first meeting, and 2 more after the next one. Then after the third I will do 4 more before heading home. Then when I come back I will do 2 laps before church starts, 2 more bewteen sacrament meeting and Sunday School. Then 2 more between Sunday School and priesthood. After church is very hectic, so I’ll not plan on any extra then. This will not be a strenous work out to say the least, but it will be enough to get me off my butt on a day that I usually do lot and lots of sitting.

Monday will be a long day again. My elliptical will not be fixed yet either, but the weather is supposed to be cold, but sunny. So I’m going to go on a long walk. I can get 6 miles done in a hour easily so I will shoot for that. I just got some new shoes so I am excited to run in them and see how it feels to workout with good shoes again. I literally had duct tap holding my last pair together.

Over that 4 day period I’m goin to shoot for 3 more lbs lost.

I’ll report how I did on Monday.

I hope that you all have a fabulous weekend.

Matt Stearmer

I’m a big fan of fun. So are my kids. And they like to play with me while I workout. So we have started doing push-ups and sit-ups together now.

Personally I get bored doing high repetitions so adding a little weight is nice. I get a better workout. Shorter. And we can do it together as a family. Fun all around.

Push-ups: With these two kids it adds up to the equivalent of about a 270 bench press. Not bad for just getting back into shape. I can do it with the two oldest as well. With him on top they bump the weight up to just under 300 lbs. I maxed out at about 340 in my hayday, so I’m getting back up there again.

Sit-ups: Tess adds about 35 lbs to my chest. As I move up the weight distribution isn’t quite that heavy, but at the bottom it is. My middle child (Savannah) can sit on my chest as well (about 70lbs). But Conner is just too big. I tried to put her on my shoulders to increase the difficulty – but that did not work too well. Oh well. Maybe in a few more weeks!

I guess te bottom line of this post is HAVE FUN. This should not be torture. Find ways to enjoy it. This is just one way for me. The kids I hope will develop a sense that exercise is enjoyable. I try to smile and talk and joke while I workout. Taken too seriously the kids will think that it is torture. I want them to grow up with a healthy respect for their bodies, but not an obsession  with it or a bad attitude about it. It should just be healthy and fun.

Matthew Stearmer

Ok, so it wasn’t that exciting. But it was the most difficult hike I’ve been on in years. Yesterday I talked about my hike up Y mountain. I’m still tried from doing that! I’ve gone over 6 miles in one stretch before – 11 is my record right now – but never anything quite as challenging as a hike straight up a mountain.

When I was younger and in better shape I used to be able to run up the whole thing. But now, I’m still carrying too much weight and I’m not as young as I used to be! Funny to say that 34. But I’ve abused my body for so many years that it will take a while to get it all back. But even still I have able t complete the 6 mile hike and I did run for about 1/2 of the way – and not just on the downhill either – see I know what your thinking. I’m still losing weight, but no matter where I go I’m still carrying a 35 lbs pack with me. So right now I’m always hiking with a back pack! I cannot wait to get it all off. All of this is going to be so much easier. And it does get easier everyday – with just a little more weight off every day.

I’ve decided to take some pictures of activities that I’ve been talking about. It will make the post a little more interesting I hope.

This is what Y mountain looks like from the far East side of Campus. I started on the far West side, so this is almost 1 mile into my hike. It is a little blurry – but the Y is right near the top trees in this photo

If you’re a sane person, this is where you drive to first, and then start the accent. It puts you about 2 miles closer and 500 feet high up than from where I started. This is the part that I ran up to. From here you can see the little white Y near the base of the cliff in this photo. That is where I am going. It is a little over a mile – and it feels like it is straight up.

And this is what it looks like from the top. You can get a sense for how steep it really is (almost a precipice of death right?). And yes that guy in the shot rode all the way up on the bike. I think that he’s more insane than I am personally. While up here I also saw a hang glider try to take off. The wind was just not quite strong enough while I was up there to get launched, but by the time I had made it down I did see him glide over. I wish I could have seen him take off. That would have been a great picture. Me above the hang glider dude.

The killer thing about it is, once you make it up you have to get back down. Which seems like an easy enough task until you feel gravity start to work on you really good. It is hard to keep from not running. On the way up the hamstrings and butt burn – then on the down it is the quads. By the time was done I was just beat.

I had not eaten really well yesterday. I had an Isagenix Shake and some yogurt, but that was it before the hike. And man it nearly beat me. I kept thinking to myself that I could just turn around. No one would know. I did not say that I was going to do it. So I had made no promises to any one. Except myself. I honestly did not think that it would bee that hard, but I serious considered turning around so many times. If I was thinking my mind would focus on how much it hurt. So I decided to just count steps. Not much better but at least I was counting progress.

In the end I won.

You can click on the button to see the route I took and do the same thing if you are in the area.

Matthew Stearmer

I’ve talked about hight intensity workouts before. This going to touch on the same subject, but I’m going to go into a specific workout that you can do to fit into even the busiest days. I’ll assume that you’ve already bout into the power of high intensity workouts for weight loss. If you’re not sure how this will help just search my archives for workout tips and you’ll see the article describing how adding High Intensity workouts to your exercise regime will make all the difference in the world to your weight loss efforts.

Today is a great example of when this type of a workout is great. I have been sitting at my computer for almost 14 hours straight today. There was so much to get done, and honestly there is still a lot more to do. But even in an intense day like this I can still get in a few exercises. HIT (High Intensity Training) workouts can be done in short burst and still retain incredible weight loss benefits.

I have an elliptical machine in my basement, so this is easy for me to do, but if all you have is a stretch of grass or pavement about 100-200 meters long you’ll be able to do the same thing.

Since I have to sit at the computer all day  do not want to be sweating all over the electronics, but I do want to get my metabolism up as much as possible. So about ever hour I will so the following.

1 set of all out push-ups

3 sets of curls – with as much weight as I can lift up to 5 reps per arm.

1 minute wind sprint – as fast as I can possible go

1 set of sit ups  – as many as possible.

This whole regime will only take about 5 minutes. It will get the heart rate up high enough to make you sweat for several minutes – but not so much that you soak your shirt. So even if you are not at home it is possible to do this and not be embarrassed by unsightly sweat rings. The first several times that you do this, it will not feel like much, but believe me – by the end of the day you will be feeling it quite a bit.

Because you are not burning off high amounts of calories with just the work out (although there is a great metabolic boost to you through the day by doing HIT  – up to 10% by some estimates) you will need to adjust your eating by a bit to make up for what you will not lose in exercise.

I shoot for a set up 10 on each of these if I am doing them throughout the day. Or you can do them all together in which case I would only do 5-7 sets. It is up to you. But you will find that combining them is extremely intense.

Just for a little inspiration here is a sprint workout video.

VIDEO

Matthew Stearmer

Generally speaking I’m fairly please with my weekend results. I was not perfect, but I did have some good success.

Here is the run down on the goals.

Run/Walk 33 miles: I only made it 24 (73% completed). I was not able to do anything on Sunday. I will get those last 10 in today.

Lose 3 lbs: I only made it 2 (66%). I will likely drop 1 more after these last 10 miles are done, so falling short here is not to bad considering I basically missed a whole day of intense exercise.

Drink 3 Gallons of water: 100 %. Yeah! This is good to help weight loss and also ensures that any weight I lose will not just be water weight.

No Spinach Cheese Dip: 50% complete. Well, I got a little overzealous in my determination to lose weight. And my wife sort of convinced me that a little break is good. So I did make the dip – and it was delicious! I did however control the portions really well. I ate only 2 oz maybe. So it was a good appetizer, but not overly indulgent. Since I did not exercise I should have eaten a little less on my meals and then I would feel a little less guilty here. But it was really really tasty:)

I wanted to get 9 hours of sleep, each night but barely managed 7. So this is just right in line with the average. So I made 0% progress here.

And finally on the back. I have started to work with it a little more to make sure that it stays healthy. I even helped move a piano over the weekend for a friend and did that without any sort of hitch developing, so I consider this a success. I’ll score it at about 80% because I need to give it more rest and I need to specifically do a few more exercises to keep from re-injuring myself.

So the average success rate over the weekend was about 65%. If this were a football team – I would not even make it into the playoffs. But if it was a batting average, I’d be the greatest hitter of all time. I’m not sure which is the better comparison – likely it is neither – but it does cause one to reflect on how to judge progress.

I did not accomplish my goals from an absolutest stand point. But since I do not believe it is possible to be perfect, I want to concentrate on being perfected. Which is a much longer process and allows for ups and downs and partial successes are even rewarded.

So here’s to the success that I had, and here’s to hopeing for a better week!

Matthew Stearmer

A friend saw one of my exercise updates and wondered if there was a kcal calculation for staying warm. And being the dork that I am, I had to try and find one.

So here are the results.

Everyone kind of intuitive knows that it will take more calories to keep the body warm in cold weather. But we should not get overly excited about the prospect that gives us on weight loss. Technically it takes a lot of calories to warm our bodies. For instance I have about 160 lbs in my body of water weight. The water weight is what really matters in this case, the solid mater in the body will take the heat of the ambient temperature of the water around it (if I understand the science correctly). If I had to warm all of that water from freezing to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit (37 degrees C) then I would burn approximately 2700 calories.

That is a ridiculous scenario of course.

So now the more complicated reality steps in. Hypothermia begins to set in at 35 degrees C. If you are just shivering then you are likely in the first mild stages of hypothermia. Not dangerous per se, but your judgment will be impaired and reaction times will slow even in the beginning stages. So if we assume that you are outside in the cold and then your body is going to have to expend – in my scenario above – approximately 150 calories to warm my body back up. But that is if your core temperature actually drops.

The vast majority of the time when we start to shiver it is just the outside of our body that is cold and needs to be warmed. Add to that the fact that our body is very efficient at transfering heat from one part of the body to the other, the insulation effect of fat, the slowing of the metabolism in the cold etc. And the net result is that cold weather activities will only burn about 5-10% more calories compared to their warm weather counterpart.

So in the scenario my friend asked about, sitting watching hockey, normally sitting, standing, cheering etc will burn somewhere in the neighborhood of 125 calories for an hour. Doing this in the cold then would mean 6-12 extra calories.

Not exactly a huge benefit to the weight loss equation.

But for sports, cross country skiing for instance, would 90 calories more if the skiing were done for real vs on the cross country machine in the gym (640 vs 730). So it can make a difference, but it is not going to be a make it or break it scenario.

You will actually burn many more calories just drink ice water since you can force your body to take in something exceptionally cold that it then is required to warm up. You end up burning a Kcal for every 1 oz of water you drink a 5 degrees Celsius and then have to warm to your body’s temperature.

Ok, I had my fun for the day. Make it a great one.

This week has been the most frustrating one so far on this journey. The back injury has been a real problem and my general moral has been effected. When I look at it quantitatively I have to be pretty satisfied. This is the first time in years that I have been injured and did not quit. And although my weight loss has stalled a little the very fact that I have not back tracked is evidence that what I am doing is working. If I were already at my ideal weight I would not be complaining at all.

But with quite a ways left to go I feel immense pressure to keep progressing.

There are a few things that i have noticed that I think that I need to do better in order to make the progress I desire.

I have been laxed in my eating. Not so much what I am eating – that part has been good. But when I am eating is the problem. Today is a good example of this. I woke up in the morning and had a ton of work to do right off the bat. So instead of working out I sat down to work. Now, I know that it is best to not eat before working out so the body is forced to burn energy from the stores in place and not the food that just entered. So I waited and waited and waited. Before I new it noon had rolled around and I had an appointment. So I rushed out the door. Now, while I was away from home I resisted the temptation to eat out because I knew that would not be health, but I had forgotten to bring anything health to eat instead of fast food. So I continued to fast.

Before coming home I did about a 6 mile walk with a pretty steep incline for the last half. I’m doing this on nothing but water for the day. When I finally got home about 6pm I was craving food. Again, I resisted the temptation to just eat something easy and bad for me and opted just for some yogurt. But just because I was able to resisted does not mean that I truly accomplished my goals.

Eating so sporadically will only  increase my bodies desire to hold on to the weight and prevent me from really getting into a much healthier lifestyle. That is completely counter productive, so I am going to start planing out my meals and days a little better so that I can have more control because I have though things through.

No one is ever perfect I and I am trying to be patient, but I know I can be better and that is what I am going to strive to do