Another satisifying day on the slopes over. Ah, I do love snowboarding season.
My friends and I took on a day’s worth of reasonably good East coast snowboarding over at Killington today. Yes, we suffered through the crowds. Yes, we suffered through the bitter winds and hardpack “snow.” And yes, we had a blast doing it.
A particularly funny situation occurred on the last run of the day. We had just polished off our final 50-50s on a series of terrain features (boxes) and found ourselves in a quandry about midway down the mountain. Our situation was:
- We could take an extremely steep, windswept black diamond trail with thin snow cover down to the lodge.
- We could hike uphill to a winding green trail with long, painful stretches of flat traversing leading down to the lodge, or
- We could duck the rope to ride a closed trail leading into the trees down to who knows where.
I know you would have chosen Door #3 as well.
Long story short, we had ourselves an adventure – great fun, actually! (Disclaimer: I do not condone the practice of ducking ropes and riding on closed off trails at ski resorts. Usually, they are roped off for a reason, as one of our slightly less skilled riders found out today, much to his dismay.) But parts of it were pure work, as true adventures often are. Everyone thoroughly exhausted but in one piece, we made our way off of the mountain and into a Ponderosa Steakhouse.
In case you are not familiar with Ponderosa, they follow a business model similar to that of Sizzler: Pay for your entree, and you get an all you can eat salad and hot food bar tacked onto your meal, gratis. A sure recipe for gluttony at its best.
Here is my personal tally for the evening. I probably would have eaten more had my wife Sairalyn not insisted I take everyone back to the hotel room as they were literally falling asleep at the table.
I ate:
- A 12 oz ribeye steak
- 3 servings of string beans
- A large salad comprised of romaine lettuce, black olives, cherry tomatoes, cucumber, and cooked (!) carrots.
- 3 cups of chicken noodle soup
- 5 chicken wingettes
- 1 slice of apple pie
- 1 slice of carrot cake
- 6 oz of tea
My companions ate comparable volumes of food – although I think Dr. Warden doubled up on me in terms of calories consumed (then again, he does outweigh me by quite a bit).
In short, performing exercise, particularly sustained exercise, makes you hungry!
Why this point is lost on all fitness professionals that recommend doing 30-60 minutes of cardio 5 days a week blah blah is beyond me. If a client is having trouble losing weight, what’s the first thing a trainer will likely say to them?
NO!!! This is not an efficient or an effective way to deal with the situation. Couple this with overestimating amount of calories burned from exercise, and it’s no wonder why so many people have trouble reaching their fat loss goals (aside from lack of motivation, discipline, incorrect notions of proper diet, you know, those little things).
My next post will deal with the latter topic, the overestimation of calories burned through exercise. Stay tuned…
