Fun thing #1: When people say "only fifty calories", apparently they 
/actually/ mean 50 kcal - i.e., 50,000 calories. This weirds me out 
slightly.

Anyway, at the end of last year, I joined a gym. I didn't actually visit 
very much, to be honest. But now I've signed my dad up too, and for the 
last two weeks we've been going to the gym together almost every night. 
Because, let's face it, we both need the calorie burn!

It would be nice to walk around with an impressive set of bulging 
muscles. But obviously that's impossible. (I mean, unless you quit your 
job and become a full-time body-builder - and how has the money to do that?)

More importantly, I love to dance, and it frustrates the living hell out 
of me that I can only dance for about 45 seconds before I'm so utterly 
dead that I can barely stand up any more. That being the case, stamina 
is something I want to work on.

The gym has all manner of machines you can play with. I did try using 
the cross-trainer. But it forces you to take unnaturally large steps, 
which make my legs really hurt. More recently I've been hitting the 
treadmill.

Dancing is complicated. It takes a lot of mental focus to do it right. 
You can't dance when you're too tired to think straight. But running is 
simple. You just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other. 
And there are no peaks and troughs to it. You just switch the machine on 
and start running.

There's a lot of psychology to exercise. If you get on the treadmill and 
start running, it's all too easy to just /stop/ when you start getting 
tired. So what I do is program the machine for a specific duration at a 
particular speed. That way I can watch the timer ticking down, I have a 
goal to aim for, and I can't move the goalposts if I get bored or tired.

Right now I have a cold. But for the last few days, I've been running 1 
mile every night. That's 10 minutes of running at 6 MPH. Sounds easy, 
right? Well let me tell you, by the end of those 10 minutes - no, wait, 
*before* the end of those 10 minutes, I am absurdly exhausted. One night 
I made the mistake of running a mile, and then an hour later trying to 
do a second one. That nearly killed me.

Fun thing #2: I used to think you could eat whatever you like and then 
go down the gym and just burn it all off. But that, apparently, is quite 
impossible.

The treadmill (and several other machines) attempts to estimate the 
number of calories you've expended. It seems to do this based solely on 
the selected speed and whatever you lied to it about your weight. (I 
would expect the /real/ energy usage to vary wildly based on a huge 
range of other parameters...)

According to this machine, my flabby 180 lbs pounding the treadmill at 6 
MPH burns about 15 kcal per minute. So a 1 mile run burns off a 150 kcal.

So far so good.

Now look at that bottle of coke in my hand. "47 kcal", it says. So just 
by having a drink when I'm done, I've completely negated 30% of that 
mile. No, wait a sec - that's 47 kcal per 100 ml! But this isn't a 100 
ml bottle - it's 550 ml. So that's... uh... 258 kcal! o_O Yes, this 
small bottle of sugar-water contains /drastically/ more calories than 
what I just half-killed myself burning off. (And trust me, after that I 
*need* a drink!)

150 kcal sounds like a lot - 150 is a big number. But when you realise 
the calorific value of some common everyday foods, you discover that 
this is peanuts. (Incidentally, peanuts have a lot of calories.)

For example, if I eat a 500g bar of chocolate, that's 1,000 kcal. Then 
again, that's a pretty big bar, so maybe it's not so surprising.

Sucrose is apparently 400 kcal per 100g. Butter (depending on which 
brand) is something like 600 kcal per 100g. Of course, nobody sits down 
and eats 100g of either of those things. But how about the bag of rice I 
had with my supper? Apparently that's 300 kcal - and that's just *rice*! 
People tell you that stuff is healthy.

Fun thing #3: For reasons beyond my comprehension, the rice gives me a 
figure per 100g, and also per "serving". Apparently the idea is that 
you're supposed to microwave this individually-packed rice and then eat 
only half of it. WTF?

Similarly, I pick up a 36g packet of crisps and it tells me the 
nutritional values "per 12g serving". Serously? Who THE HELL buys an 
entire bag of crisps, opens it, and then eats only one third of it? I 
mean, if we were talking about one of those big over-sized packets then 
sure. But the little hand-sized ones? I've seen plenty of people buy two 
and eat them both. There's hardly anything in them, after all.

It seems crystal clear to be that the /only/ reason the manufacturers 
would possibly do this is so that they can print smaller, less 
frightening numbers on the packet. Nobody eats a third of a packet of 
crisps; that's, like, 4 individual flakes!

Perhaps my next project should be to sit down and compute the calorific 
value of those lemon cakes I keep making. (I doubt the value changes 
significantly due to cooking...)

Fun thing #4: Apparently I can lift 100kg with my legs. Notice that *I* 
weigh less than 100kg. Weird, eh?

I can also left 45kg with my arms. It's taken me a while to work up to 
that. I doubt I can lift any more than that, not because my arms won't 
do it, but because my wrists can't take the load...

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