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OKC Million met Amber England during the OKC Memorial Marathon Expo. This bubbly, full-of-energy individual stopped by the booth and signed up on the Mayor's Program. Already over 90 pounds successful on her weight loss journey, Amber shared how she had under 20 pounds to meet her overall goal. Below is Amber's description of her exercise assessment at WeightWise HealthPlex.
Assessments Make the Difference
June 19, 2008
Note to self….never and I repeat never, agree to shoot a video at 7 AM in the morning after fasting since 7 PM the night before. The result is that all the work you have done to clean up your grammar and speak in complete sentences and appear polished, well groomed and poised for a run at President someday (totally kidding, I’ll leave that to people more crazy than myself) just goes out the window. Despite the noticeably absent caffeine that usually makes me appear more humorous than I am in real life, and lack of functioning brain cells so early in the morning, the metabolic testing I just endured at Oklahoma City’s own WeightWise Center was worth its weight in gold. Seriously, I should have done this testing MONTHS ago. The testing I did was two fold. First up was a RMR test. That’s fancy medical speak for finding out my exact Resting Metabolic Rate—the rate at which my body burns calories doing absolutely nothing at all. That’s right you heard me, your body actually burns calories sitting around doing nothing. Our bodies, I have learned throughout the course of this journey, are in deed quite efficient machines. The second part of the test was to find out about a fancy thing called Vo2 Max. More about Vo2 Max in a bit, right now I want to focus on RMR.
Knowing your RMR is important to weight loss and to maintenance because it will determine how many calories you should consume in fuel (the food you put in your body) each day to stay on track. And while RMR only represents about 70 percent of the calories your body naturally burns in a day, knowing that number will help you immensely. Once you know that number you can use some pretty simple math to get the other 30 percent and then, viola, you know exactly how many calories your body burns in a day. And once you have that number, you can decide how to create a calorie deficit that will appropriately allow you to lose one to two pounds each week. A simple rule of thumb is to take the RMR number and times it by 1.3 to get the other 30 percent and then decide how many calories you want to reduce that number by through diet and exercise. Are you still with me? Let me show you an example.
Through the RMR testing I did at Weight Wise, I discovered by body burns roughly 1338 calories each day. If I take that number and times it by 1.3, I come up with 1739—the total number of calories my body burns every day. Now, say I want to lose one pound each week. Knowing there are 3500 calories in a pound I know I need to create a 3500 calorie deficit to lose one pound. How do I do that? I do it two ways. I reduce my calorie intake by 250 a day, which puts me at roughly 1500 calories a day, and then I can burn the other 250 through exercise. You can easily burn 250 calories with a quick 30 minutes in the gym at a moderate intensity. This is where the second part of the metabolic testing comes in. (More about that in a minute….bear with me please) And if I don’t want to reduce the calories I consume because I would like my body to get 1800 calories of food a day, I can increase my exercise time to one hour to create the 500 calorie deficit necessary a day to help me lose one pound a week. It’s that simple folks! If I can do it, I know you can too!!!!!!
Now…the Vo2 Max test. Sheesh! Not as fun as the RMR test at all because it involves me getting on a treadmill, running until I drop dead and then acting happy about it. Totally kidding, folks, it wasn’t that bad. It was a 12 minute test where I did in fact have to run on a treadmill with that annoying mask again. Basically the test should show where my body works the most efficiently to burn the most fat. It’s also a great indicator of your cardiovascular fitness level—again fancy medical speak for judging how well your body adapts when you push it. Thanks to some kick-butt spin classes and running until I literally puked over the last year, I am happy to report my Vo2 Max number was quite impressive. 52.5 to be exact. To be honest, I have no idea what that number means on its own. What I do know is the chart comparing you to others in your same age group told me the most. I was above average (which is always nice for the ego to hear) …so take that all you haters that doubted I had any athletic ability back in the day! You can Google Vo2 Max to get all the intimate details about its importance, I am not going to focus on that in this blog. I’m going to focus on why it’s important for the last 11 pounds I have to lose to reach my weight loss goal.
Basically in a nutshell what it told me was this: AMBER SLOW DOWN, exercise smarter, not harder. Hmmmm…..hard to hear for sure. I mean seriously? For the last 12 months I have walked into the gym with the mentality if I wasn’t burning at least 10 calories a minute I might as well go on home. Apparently that isn’t the case. While that mentality was important to my weight loss initially, now that I have a good fitness foundation, I need to slow down and target my work outs to really bust through this latest weight loss plateau. (yes, plateaus are of the devil, but they can be busted through, trashed, beat down…whatever you want to call it) The Vo2 Max told me my body burns the most fat when my heart is working in a range of 120-130 beats per minute. To put that in perspective for you, when I am running through Heritage Hills on any given Sunday, my heart rate is pumping at about 155-165. When I spin at Aspen Athletic depending on my focused and competitive nature that day I am sitting at roughly 165-175 and can push upwards of 180-190 if I am really booking it. And when I am sprinting on the treadmill I can push my heart to 200 BPM…..but I feel like I could die at any time, and I wouldn’t recommend it, unless you are seriously glutton for punishment!
Guess what the Vo2 Max test told me?????????? While I am burning tons of calories doing that crazy cardio workout, my body is burning through the carbs and not the fat that I want it to burn. So now I know for the next 11 pounds I need to rein it in from time to time so my body can become a more efficient fat burning machine. I can still train hard four days a week so that I don’t lose my cardio fitness level I built over the past year, but I need to slow it down some to really reach my full potential. Now, I am going to be the first to admit this will be HARD for me. I know one speed and that speed happens to be full out, balls to the wall so to speak. Over the course of the next few weeks or so, the exercise physiologist tells me slower should become my new best friend. I can’t say I am overly excited. But I abide by the rules…for the most part.
Moral of this REALLY long blog that is probably full of way too many boring fitness and medical terms is this: GO GET THE TEST DONE ON YOURSELF. The only thing you have to lose are the pounds holding you back from being your absolute best.
Happy Smarter Work Outs Oklahoma City!!!!!!
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