Habit of Health Challenge — week 3
Yesterday started week 3 of my Habit of Health challenge. In week three, we asked our athletes to continue tracking their water, sleep, and food consumption while adding the amount of calories they burned each day. The calories you burn each day are the calories you burn from any exercise you do in a day plus your basal metabolic rate (BMR). Basal metabolic rate is the amount of calories your body burns during normal daily function to keep you alive. Generally, people are intimidated when they see the large number of calories associated with the food they eat each day and immediately start a health or nutrition plan by trying to limit or put a cap on the number of calories they consume. Instead, we wanted to teach our athletes to not be intimidated by the calories associated with the food they eat each day so we started with the calories we burn first. We wanted to teach our athletes that even without any exercise our body needs a certain amount of calories to function.
Helping our athletes calculate or estimate their basal metabolic rates was easy because of the vast number of calculators online. Here is one of those calculators if you want to calculate your BMR (https://www.active.com/fitness/calculators/bmr). The calculation for exercise is a little trickier because it is based on so many factors including age, weight, heart rate, intensity levels, type of exercise, and on and on. The important fact here was that the calories burned during exercise are an estimate even with a fancy watch or tracker. We provided athletes with online resources to track their calorie burn (https://www.verywellfit.com/how-many-calories-you-burn-during-exercise-4111064) or helped them estimate the calories burned during a workout. The most important part here was that they were building the habit of tracking their exercise and they knew how many calories their bodies needed just to function.
Today I have drank 32 ounces of water so far I’m going to drink another 32 ounces before bed and I got 5 hours of sleep. I went on a run for my movement today and stretched a bit. My BMR is roughly 1500 cal and I burned 450 calories on my run so 1900 calories out total. I skipped breakfast this morning and had two sushi rolls for lunch and chicken parm for dinner.
