Calories In, Calories Out

I was just reading an interesting blog that talked about calorie intake for athletes. This blogger believes that 2000 calories plus about 150-200 per hour trained during the day would do it, but that eating over about 2400 for a female is too much.

This of course made me do some calculations. Using the Compendium of Physical Activities (Ainsworth et al., Med. Sci. Sports Exerc., Vol. 32, No. 9, Suppl., pp. S498-S516, 2000--in case you're interested), I calculated that based on my weight (52.3 kg -- that is, before this weekend when I dehydrated about 4 pounds out of it), my resting metabolism for one day is about 1255 kcal. Generally, you burn one kcal per kg of body weight per hour at rest. Based on my average pace this past week, I burn about 627 kcal/hr cycling, 601 kcal/hr running (slowly), and 497 kcal/hr swimming. This seems a little weird to me, since I'd have thought my running would be more expensive per minute, but that's another subject.

So Saturday and Sunday combined, I burned 4389 kcal cycling and 1550 kcal running. 5939 kcal = approximately 1 bag of Nutter Butter Bites (1120) + 1 box of mini s'mores sandwich cookies (1350) + 8 Kroger brand chocolate chip pecan cookies (1920).

The only problem is that I had WAY more than 8 of those cookies. Good thing I don't limit myself to 2400 kcal/day!

YUM.