I've updated my data page.

It’s the start of a new quarter, so I wanted to post an update on how my health is evolving. You’ll see a review of summer quarter on my data page.

The good news is, I’ve lost 17 pounds so far this year.

The (bad? neutral? other?) news is that I lied about how much I weighed when I started this venture.

Well, maybe not lied in the strictest sense. If I may reveal my Catholic upbringing for a moment, I would tell you that it wasn’t a lie of commission so much as a lie of omission.

The truth is, I didn’t know exactly how much I weighed when I started, because I didn’t want to know. I guessed 240 lbs. as a ballpark figure.

So when I weighed in at 231 lbs. at a checkup last month, I thought I’d lost 9 lbs. in total. Not bad, but not as much as I wanted for 9 months work. Then my doctor congratulated me on losing 17 lbs. and asked me how I did it. I didn’t believe her at first, so she turned her computer monitor to me and showed me my chart. I weighed 248 lbs. in January (a weigh-in in which I distinctly remember looking away from the scale and sort of humming to myself, while asking the nurse not to tell me the number) and 231 lbs. in September.

So then I had the conundrum of wanting to brag about losing 17 lbs., but having to admit that I was 248 lbs. at the start.

Here it is, out on the table. I lied. Lied lied lied. There you have it.

Other changes are afoot… Though my weight has stayed the same since last month, my clothes are still getting looser, so I think (hope) that maybe my body composition is changing. People keep telling me that I look slimmer, but I’m not certain whether they are just saying that. This morning my husband told me I look “more hourglass-y,” which is a good thing.

I know that I would probably get healthier faster if I changed my eating habits, which I have not done at all this year. I’ve just been working out a lot and hoping for the best. Steven Devor, associate professor of exercise science, offered to give me a little nutritional counseling some time ago — and I’m aware of formal nutritional counseling programs at Ohio State — but I’m having trouble getting past the “I don’t want to” hurdle.

C’est la vie.

Justin Dials of PAES puts me in the BOD POD.

As it turns out, my earlier body composition testing was a little wonky. In March, Rebecca Nguyen, manager of the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program, measured the amount of fat on my body with calipers, warning me all the while that calipers are, in fact, one of the least accurate tools for doing so.

That test determined my body fat percentage to be 39.9 percent and my lean weight — the weight of the non fat portion of my body (my bones, muscles, and organs) — to be 144 pounds.

Now, I may be 5′8″ tall, but 144 pounds is a heck of a lean weight. Either I was truly dense as I had been joking all along, or something was a little off.

This week, I had a chance to go back to the Exercise Science Laboratory in the School of Physical Activity and Educational Services and sit in the BOD POD — one of the most accurate devices available for measuring body composition. It was a high-tech and fun experience, and I had my results instantly.

The BOD POD works by measuring a person’s weight and volume, explained graduate student Justin Dials. Then a computer uses that information to calculate body composition.

"Yes, I see... Mmm-hm."

I stood on an electronic scale for the weighing part, and then sat in a cool space-egg pod contraption for the volume part. Special electronics inside the egg measured how much air my body displaced to obtain my volume. This involved some air pressure changes inside the pod, and my ears popped a little. It kind of felt like being on an airplane. Kind of loud like being on an airplane, too.

Seconds later, I had my results: 50.3 percent fat, 122.6 pounds lean weight. That, sadly, makes much more sense.

I will also say that the supposedly highly accurate electronic scale weighed me many pounds heavier than my scale at home. Therefore I will completely disregard my weight as measured by the BOD POD and pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Rebecca agreed with me that what’s important is to always weigh yourself on the same scale, and look at the change in weight, not the specific number. So I’m going to stick with my scale at home, which currently shows that I’ve lost five pounds.

Let’s try that again:

I LOST FIVE POUNDS!

Yeah, that looks better.

And if you check out my new data page, you’ll see that I received some other good news, as Rebecca re-measured me: I’ve lost nearly two inches around my hips. Woo-hoo!

My husband just gave me an early birthday present: a heart rate monitor and accessories so that I can accurately measure the intensity of my workouts and the calories I’m burning.

I am often confused by the way different exercise machines present their data. Every machine, it seems, has a different way of telling me how much work I am doing. What on Earth, I have always wondered, is a “Met”? And different machines seem to give wildly different measures of the calories I’m burning for the same activity. Could one brand of elliptical machine really make me burn 100 more calories than another?

When Matthew Garver, a doctoral student in health and exercise science, gave me my exercise prescription, he explained some of the more confusing elements. He said, for instance, that Mets are a measure of metabolic rate, or energy expenditure. My VO2max rating of 24.5 could be expressed as 7 Mets.

He suggested that a good way to know whether I was exercising at the optimum rate was to look not to Mets or even calories, but to the number of watts I was generating. Watts are a measure of power, in the amount of energy per second that I expend while I’m on the machine. Then I can check my heart rate (on the machines that offer this option) to gauge how hard my body is working to generate that amount of power.

He suggested that I aim for 40 watts. Based on my resting heart rate and peak heart rate during my fitness test, I know that my heart rate should vary between 138 (warming up) and 167 (working hard) if I want to stay in the right “zone” for burning calories. About.com has great instructions on how to calculate your own cardio zone.

Now, I may write about mathematical sciences for a living, but I’ve reached my limit on what I want to calculate on my own. Hence the heart rate monitor. It will not only give me more accurate data than an exercise machine (because it is directly measuring my heart rate the entire time I’m working out), it will let me upload the data to my computer for analysis. At that point, I’m happy to let the computer do all the work!

I’ll try these out for a while, and will post a product review.

My fitness evaluation from the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program.

I got the results from my comprehensive fitness evaluation from the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program (FSFP)!

Matthew Garver, a doctoral student in health and exercise science, explained my results in detail, and gave me an “exercise prescription” that will help me lose weight and meet my goals.

Not surprisingly, I earned a rating of “below average” in all categories, except one: flexibility. For that, I rated “average.”

Let us pause for a minute and appreciate the fact that I am, in one sense at least, average. Yay!

Now, onto the things I need to improve.

VO2max: This is a measure of endurance, and it’s why I took the stress test on the treadmill. Specifically, VO2max measures how well my body utilizes oxygen in milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of my body weight per minute (ml/kg/min). Professional athletes can use as much as 70 ml/kg/min; a young woman with no athletic training who is otherwise healthy might might use 38. (For men, the corresponding number would be 45.)

VO2max decreases with age, and since I’m 38 years old, I wouldn’t expect to have the same VO2 max as a young woman. But I did rate a lot lower than I’d hoped: 24.5. Matthew explained that, as I lost weight, this number would increase, since I’d be dividing my milliliters of oxygen by a smaller number of kilograms.

As to body composition, this was a measure of my percentage body fat. For women, a body comp over 32 percent is considered obese. (For men, the corresponding number would be 25 percent). I scored 39.9.

All I can say is that I’d rather have a body comp of 39.9 than a body decomp of 39.9. (Those of you who watch Law and Order or CSI know what I’m talking about.) But I need to bring that number down. As Matthew explained, I am at a higher risk for chronic diseases such as cancer, coronary artery disease, hypertension, and diabetes if things stay as they are. He suggested that I work toward a percentage of 20-25.

I was surprised by his estimate of my “lean weight,” however. This is a measure of the non-fat portions of my body, i.e. if it were possible to remove all fat from my body, how much would the leftover bone, muscle, and organs weigh? My lean weight was 144 pounds.

I’m 5′8″ tall, so I guess this makes sense. But if I had a 25 percent body fat on top of a 144 pound frame, I would weigh 192 pounds! Not so long ago, after my initial major weight loss, I weighed 180. And I felt huge! I felt like I needed to lose at least 20 more pounds. But if I did weigh 160, that would give me a body fat percentage of 10 percent, which is normally something only professional athletes attain. Bizarre.

So I guess if I could get back to 180 pounds (which would mean 20 percent body fat), I should be really happy.

See, I told you. I’m just really, really dense.

Lastly, Matthew explained my muscle strength, which is the force I was able to generate during the arm press and leg press. It’s given as a ratio of pounds I could press divided by my weight. I was able to press 80 lbs with my arms, and 130 lbs with my legs. That means my upper body strength ratio was 33 percent, and my lower body strength ratio was 54 percent.

I really had no idea what those numbers meant, but I was able to badger Matthew until he conceded that the average person off the street who’d never lifted weights in their life would probably score about the same as me. “I mean, it’s not like I’m some kind of weakling or something, right?” I asked. He kindly agreed with me.

The FSFP gym.

He suggested that I aim toward at least doubling those numbers, so my upper body strength goal is 60-70 percent, and my lower body goal is greater than 100 percent.

I won’t be weight training right away, though. For now, I’m supposed to focus on aerobic exercise. Matthew pointed me toward the elliptical trainer, stationary bike, and rowing machine in the FSFP gym as good places to get started. He recommended that I try for 30-40 minutes of aerobic work, most days per week. That’s about what I’m doing now, so I’m feeling pretty good about that.

Nowhere to go from here — but up.

Justin took my blood pressure before we started. I was a little nervous.

Everyone who joins the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program gets to take an hour-long comprehensive fitness test in the Exercise Physiology Lab for free. But not everyone gets to bring their own photographer. I brought Jo McCulty from my office’s Photo Services department. By the time I was on the treadmill and wired to the EKG, I thought better of the whole idea, but it was too late to back out.

Rebecca Nguyen, Program Manager of FSFP, and Health and Exercise Science graduate student Justin Dials performed the tests, which included my body composition, stress test, strength test, and flexibility. I have a meeting with someone later today to get my results, but here’s the play-by-play of the testing:

Early in the stress test -- low speed, slight elevation. Justin is asking me to rate my effort, and Rebecca is standing by to take my blood pressure.

It started with the body composition testing, which Rebecca performed with calipers. The measurements she took on my arm, abdomen, and legs will be used to calculate my percentage body fat. I could have done this testing in the Bod Pod, but it is undergoing maintenance. I plan to try the Bod Pod another day.

After Rebecca put about a dozen electrical leads on my chest — all in different places around my heart — she and Justin wired me to the EKG and the first of many blood pressure measurements began. Then it was on to the stress test — the first I’d ever had.

I didn’t know what to expect. I thought maybe they were going to run me on the treadmill to exhaustion, until I went flying off the back of the thing. At least, that’s how I always pictured a stress test.

Justin kept an eye on my EKG.

It was actually much easier to manage than I thought. The idea was not to fling me off the treadmill, but simply to have me walk with tiny increases in speed and elevation until I reached my maximum heart rate. That’s an indicator of whether my heart can pump enough blood (and, by extension, oxygen) to my muscles for exercise.

Since I have been using cardio equipment at RPAC several days a week since this adventure began, working up to my maximum heart rate and staying there a while was a familiar feeling. If I felt lightheaded or like I could go on no longer, I was to hit the emergency stop button on the treadmill.

Rebecca took my blood pressure afterwards. Whew! (You can see that I'm red-faced and sweaty here.)

I spent most of the stress test working at what felt like a moderate effort level. Jo complained that I wasn’t sweating enough. I’d asked her to document my effort, so she wanted to see actual beads of sweat! Those came later, when I was near the end of the stress test.

At the height of the test, I was just fine… until I was totally not fine. Fatigue came suddenly. That, Rebecca said, was the point — they wanted to max out my aerobic capacity. With lots of encouragement, I stayed on the treadmill as long as they wanted me to, and didn’t have to hit the stop button. I have no memory of how how long I was on there.

——————-

Then it was on to the strength testing, where they measured the heaviest weight that I could manage on two machines: the leg press and the chest press.

Pre-leg-press euphoria. This might be the only flattering photo, so I'm making it bigger than the rest.

Rebecca, Justin, and Jo all gave me the same advice, and they were right — grunting helps.

Rebecca:"Come on! You can do it!" Me:"Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrggghhhh!"

Rebecca showed me the right form for the chest press.

I can reach a little past my toes -- yay!

That was it. I felt pretty good afterwards, and I’m looking forward to my results!

Have you taken the RealAge quiz online, which supposedly tells you your “biological age” based on your health?

Science writer Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times takes issue with RealAge, and points readers to a better quiz:

My problem with the RealAge quiz is its lack of scientific validity. The notion that health behaviors can translate into a meaningful “biological age” is just marketing hype, not real science.

A better health quiz is Your Disease Risk, a useful set of questions to help you determine your risk for diabetes, several cancers, heart disease, osteoporosis and stroke.

It might be worth taking the Your Disease Risk quiz, to compare the results to the Your Plan for Health PHA.