A – assymmetry

B- border

C – color

D – diameter

E – evolving

More information here.

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To calculate daily Calorie needs, you can use the online tools described below. In case you need to convert from centimeters to inches or kilograms to pounds you can use google. One foot has 12 inches.

Calorie Calculator at freedieting.com
You need to enter your age, gender, weight (in pounds or kilos), height (in feet and inches only) and exercise level. Then you press “Calculate” button and get three numbers:

• Maintenance – how many Calories you need daily to maintain your current weight
• Fat Loss – how many Calories you need daily if you want to lose fat
• Extreme Fat Loss – how many Calories you need daily if you want to lose fat faster (note: this is only appropriate for people who are very overweight not for someone who wants to lose a few kilos)

You can also select “Advanced Options” where you can choose how the results are calculated. It can be interesting to compare different values. And if you know your body fat percentage you can use it to make the results more accurate.

There is also an option for “7 day calorie cycle (zig-zag)” which gives you Calories per day but in a weekly cycle. The idea is to vary the daily Calories intake in order to prevent so called “weight loss vicious cycle“.

Daily Caloric Metabolic Calculator at HikingUpward.com
Here you need your weight in pounds, height in feet and inches, age, gender, body type (muscular, average or overweight) and activity level. Pressing “Calculate Daily Caloric Requirement” and you’ll get two values:

• BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate) – how many Calories you’d burn per day if you stayed whole 24 hours in bed.
• Daily caloric requirements to remain at your current weight – this adds to BMR the Calories required for all the activities you do during the day.

Calorie Calculator at ExRx.net
Again you need to enter a similar set of values: sex, age, weight (Pounds or Kilograms), height (in inches or centimeters) or body fat percentage. You also need to estimate your average activity levels by specifying how many hours per day you are resting or performing activities at different levels. Pressing the “Calculate” button gives you again three numbers:

• BMR – Basal Metabolic Rate
• Activity – additional Calories you burn per day due to your activity level.
• Total Calories – the sum of the above two numbers.

Diet Calculator at ScientificPsychic.com
This tool takes a bit different approach. Here beside the usual height, weight, sex and activity level you also need to enter measurements of your waist, neck and (for females only) hips. Press “Calculate” button and based on these values the page will calculate:

• Body Mass Index – values over 25 indicate being overweight unless your body is very muscular (BMI calculation doesn’t take into account fat/muscle ratio)
• Waist-to-Height ratio – values above 0.5 indicate too much abdominal fat
• Percent Body Fat
• Lean Body Mass
• Whether you’re underweight, overweight or have weight in normal range
• Minimum caloric requirements – this takes into account your BMI and automatically tries to reduce your Calories per day if BMI is over 25
• Minimum content of proteins in your diet

If you use these tools you should get a better idea on the amount of Calories you should be consuming on average. Regardless whether you want to maintain your current weight, lose some fat or gain some muscle you need to know these numbers in order to properly control your diet.

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Some other foods don’t come with these numbers. For example let’s say you buy some eggs, few bananas, carrots and a 300 g beef steak. All of them might come without a label explaining the nutrition values. How can you find out how many calories, proteins, etc. will you be consuming?

I usually start with google for this kind of questions. Simply type something like “eggs nutritional values” into the search box and you’ll find some useful information. About eggs. Then you need to repeat the same for bananas, carrots and beef steak. Pretty boring, huh? That’s why I’m posting here links to pages which contain information about multiple foods so you don’t have to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out what’s in your dinner.

The web pages with nutritional values come in two flavours – charts and databases.

Charts – these web pages contain tables containing information about multiple foods usually all on one page. They are simple, quick to use tables but usually contain less entries than databases. To search use the “Find in this page” feature of your web browser – usually it can be activated by pressing Ctrl+F.

• Mike’s Calorie and Fat Gram Chart for 1000 foods
• Food Nutrition Counts at fitwise.com
• Calories in Fast Food
• Calorie Chart for Healthy Food
• Calorie Chart from bodybuilding site elitefitness.com
• Food Nutrition Tables (this is actually a set of multiple tables with few thousands of entries)

Databases – on these pages you can search for a specific food by entering its name. Usually contain more entries than charts.

• CalorieKing
• a Calorie Counter
• USDA National Nutrient Database

Try finding out what’s in your next meal

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How do you find all this information?

First you can start with labels on the foods themselves. For example the smoked salmon I’m eating right now came in a package with a note on the back saying that 100g of it contains:

• 162 kcal (When people talk about calories they usually mean food Calories or kilo calories – kcal – which means thousands of calories. Unless they’re physicists then they might be actually using calorie as a calorie not as a short cut for kcal. The recommended 2000 calories daily really means 2000 kcal. If you tried to live on 2000 calories – 2 kcal – you’d end up in a pretty bad shape pretty quickly.)
• 19.3 g of proteins
• less than 0.1 g carbohydrates
• 9.4 g fat
• some other stuff which might be also useful to know

The box with smoked salmon also mentions that it contains 200 g of the fish so if I eat half of it that means I’ll be consuming 162 kcal, 19.3 g proteins, 0 g carbohydrates and 9.4 g fat.

Another example – sliced cheese. The cheese came in a 450 g package containing 18 slices of cheese and with a label specifying the content of 100 g as:

• 358 kcal
• 27 g proteins
• less than 0.1 g carbohydrates
• 28 g fat
• big amount of calcium

One slice of this cheese weights 450 g / 18 = 25 g and provides 89.5 kcal, 6.75 g proteins, 0 g carbohydrates and 7 g fat.

Third example, cranberry juice. Again, let’s read the label. 100 ml of juice provides:

• 51 kcal
• less than 0.1 g proteins – no surprise here
• 12.2 g carbohydrates
• less than 0.1 g fat – again not surprising
• some vitamins

So if you drink 200 ml glass of cranberry juice you’ll consume 102 kcal and 24.4 g carbohydrates.

Let’s sum it up. 100 g of smoked salmon + two slices of cheese + 200 ml glass of cranberry juice. That gives us:

• 162 kcal from salmon + 189 kcal from cheese + 102 kcal from juice for a total of 453 kcal
• 19.3 g proteins from salmon + 13.5 g from cheese + 0 g from juice for a total of 32.8 g of proteins
• 0 g carbohydrates from salmon + 0 g from cheese + 24.4 g from juice for a total of 24.4 g of carbohydrates
• 9.4 g fat from salmon + 14 g from cheese + 0 g from juice for a total of 23.4 g of fat

In general you can find labels with these values on all pre-packaged food. Depending on the shop the labels can be present even on things like minced meat.

What about all the other foods like loose fruit or vegetables? You’ll find out in the next post

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From my occasional interest and pursuit of bodybuilding I’ve collected the following information about how to gain muscle mass. To build the muscles you need to do high resistance and low repetition count exercises, which basically means:

• Train each muscle group (for example biceps) once per week. Don’t do it more often as the muscles need time to recover and grow.
• Regardless whether you use machines or free weights, the resistance should be selected such that you can do no more than 3 series of 8 repetitions in each series. Some people recommend an even lower repetition count.
• Each repetition should be done very slowly, let’s say 10 seconds for the concentric movement (in which muscles get shorter) and 5 seconds for the eccentric movement (in which muscles are forced to elongate). The movement should be steady and controlled.
• Give yourself a couple of minutes of rest between the series.
• The last repetition in the 3rd series should trigger thoughts like “There’s no way I can do this even one more time even if someone puts a gun to my head and says ‘Do it again or I kill you’”. The muscles should hurt. No pain – no gain.

Progress:

• Each week you should be able to add a few extra kilos until you reach your physiological limit. So keep track of the weight used each week.

Diet and sleep:

• Very important is also the diet. You need high protein content. More than the usual 80-100 grams per day. Basically if you want extra kilos of muscles you have to get extra N times that of proteins in your food. So you probably have to at least double your daily protein intake. Make sure your kidneys are OK as they will have more work filtering your blood.
• During the exercise you’ll use lots of energy in a short time so you have to eat carbohydrates a few hours before. Something like pasta with tuna is good as it has carbohydrates and proteins. Avoid sugary foods as they lower testosterone levels and you need testosterone to gain muscles. There are other things to avoid like caffeinated drinks and fried foods, more about it here.
• Get enough sleep – during sleep is when the growth hormone is produced and you need it for the muscles to grow. That’s also when your imagination can roam free and show you in advance the benefits of your new improved body…

Safety advice:

• If it hurts anywhere else than the muscles you’re at the moment exercising, especially chest pain, stop immediately. I’m not counting the painful faces of other gym members…
• Remember to breath properly all the time when exercising otherwise you can get problems with high blood pressure.
• If you’re unsure about your health consult a doctor.
• If you’re unsure about your exercise program consult a professional trainer.
• If you’re unsure about your finances, go read some other blog…

That’s about it. Now go and move your butt.

Or … you could stay a bit longer and read a few more posts on olivetalks.com.

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• Are bananas worth the crisps (6)

Bananas are good for you. They have bla bla bla and you should eat them. Ok, but their taste… they are like too mushy and after you eat them you have this weird after taste… But they say they are good so a few years back I discovered a way that helped me not mind eating them so much: I eat them alongside crisps. Preferably wrinkled and salty crisps. A bite of a banana and a crisp, another bite of the banana and another crisp. The saltiness and taste of the crisps combine perfectly with the taste of bananas. They do!

So every time I buy a kilo of bananas I buy myself a big bag of crisps. And so I’ve been doing for the last few years. Then, two days ago, the question popped into my brain totally unexpectedly. Are bananas worth the crisps? Let me put it more clearly: is eating a handful of crisps, with all their “badness” ok as long as I eat a banana with all its “goodness”? If you are a mathematician like my sister or the guy in Numb3rs, you will have spotted an equation with two unknowns in the previous question. If you didn’t spot it, well, it just means you belong to the less geeky group of people that visit olivetalks. In any case, it will be clear for everybody that without knowing the extent of the “badness” of crisps or the “goodness” of bananas, we cannot solve the mystery of whether bananas are worth the crisps.

Why, oh why do we have to solve this mystery? Because now that I’ve wondered it I cannot continue eating crisps alongside my bananas without feeling that it might be actually worse than not eating bananas at all! So, go to the kitchen, grab a banana and a bag of crisps and let us eat, I mean analyze.

Wow! there is a banana page!! Check it out: banana.com! I like their banana favicon Anyway, according to that page and this other one, bananas have – depending on their size – between:

• 450 and 600 mg of potassium
• 80 and 140 calories
• 1 and 2 grams of proteins
• 3 and 4 grams of fiber
• 25 and 35 grams of carbohydrates
• 7 and 9 mg of calcium
• 40 mg magnesium (both pages state the same value)
• A bunch of vitamins, including A, B and C

All that in one banana.

On the other hand, 20 g of crisps, which is the amount think I eat per banana, have:

• 106 kcal
• 1.3 g proteins
• 9.8 g carbohydrates
• 6.8 g fat

As always, without a calibrated scale, measurements don’t really mean anything. So, the recommended daily allowances are about:

• potassium: 4700 mg
• calories: 2,200 – 2,500 kcal
• proteins: 50 g
• fiber: 25 g
• carbohydrates: 300 g
• calcium: 1000 mg
• magnesium: 400 mg
• fat: 70 g

Hmmmm… so… it should be ok? I remember something about the fat being the source of the problems if it was unsaturated… or something like that… Aha, check this page from Bupa on diet and nutrition: it basically says that if the fat is saturated, like it is usually in crisps, then it should be avoided. Oh dear… Ok, this is actually funny:

Coconut and olive oil are the only vegetable oils that are really safe, but butter and lamb fat, which are highly saturated, are generally very safe (except when the animals have been poisoned). Source: HEALL’s Community for Body Mind Soul Earth Well Being Resources

At least the animal part is funny . So basically, avoid foods cooked with oils other that olive oil. I know, I won’t avoid coconut oil.. if I ever see it. Jo, que rollo, I like my dose of crisps with the bananas. Bummer, what am I going to do?

I guess to start with, I should really stop eating these crisps. I mean, I did finish eating the banana 2 hours ago…

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Out of the 30 days I exercised 19. That means I skipped more than one third. Not good. I could say that half of the days I didn’t exercise I had the flu but that would be just an excuse I think, after all I was working during those days. Some days I just felt lazy.

So on one hand I didn’t really achieve the stated goal. Nonetheless I think I got pretty good results:

1. I’ve exercised during this one month more than I did in the whole previous year.
2. I know I’m going to exercise more in the future. I want to make it a regular habit. Maybe it won’t be every day but definitely every 2-3 days. Combined with walking to work and back (25 minutes each way) it should do me good.
3. I’ve learned that the best time for me to do this kind of exercise is just after getting up in the morning. Since I’m getting up at 5 am I’ve got time to exercise before having breakfast and going to work. Later on it’s just more difficult to get myself to do it since I want to pursue other, more engaging, activities. But in the morning, just after getting up it can take some time to get my brain working at the right speed. Exercising makes this process faster and it doesn’t feel like a waste of time as if I was to just sit there for half an hour trying to wake up.

Overall I think it’s a positive result. Not exactly what it said on the box but still useful. The lessons I’ve learned are worth enough to compensate for those eleven missed days.

If you did follow the challenge I’d like to know your opinion about the final result.

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Out of the nine days when I have exercised as planned I’ve spent most of the time on our stationary bike. Since yesterday I’m on the most difficult level in the computer controlled training programs so I might need to start using the manual program which allows to increase the load even more.

By the way, we’ve been tracking our usage of the bike even before the beginning of my challenge. The reason for that was that we wanted to know how long would it take us to use the bike enough times as to recover its cost. Our estimate was that each of us needed to use it for 10 hours. This was based on the price of the bike (€300), the cost of a visit to a gym in our neighborhood (€7.50) and the average duration of exercise on a bike in the gym (30 minutes). LadyRostand disagrees with this calculation

At the moment we’ve got a total of 16.5 hours done! Over half of that is thanks to LadyRostand who’s been exercising more regularly than me. At the same time, over one third is from this month which includes all I’ve been doing as part of the 30-day challenge.

My plan is to continue with the challenge but I want to use a bit less the bike and do more higher-variety exercises.

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1. Stationary bike program 7 level 8
2. Stationary bike program 12 level 7
3. Batuka combined with shadow kickboxing
4. Stationary bike program 7 level 8

The programs for the stationary bike probably won’t mean anything to you but on my bike program 12 level 7 is a bit harder than program 7 level 8. Level 8 is the highest. The stationary bike is Ergometer Stamm »Ergo Thunder Pro«.

The exercise from day three (Batuka plus shadow kickboxing) had actually highest intensity – I still have sore muscles in places after two days. So I’ll be doing more of that Because of the nature of this exercise it engages the whole body and uses short bursts of energy rather than working at a constant level. And it’s also more fun.

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