might even be easier to add pounds than subtract gramsOriginally Posted by DownYonder
I think the OP is funny. The second post in the thread may add some confusion. In my opinion, it is entirely a ranger responsible for issuing permits to caution someone planning to hike 20 miles. It would be a waste of time and overstepping his role to grill all applicants on their experience and evaluate their abilities to see if 20 miles is reasonable. Just a quick word of caution and let them determine for themselves if they are up for it. As I was reading through the thread, I had trouble determining if some were commenting on the OP or the second post.
A lot of people would probably say they've never used algebra. But when a person understands that algebra and geometry and math in general is just about deductive reasoning, then it DOES become a tool for daily use.
People are so funny. I expect younger people to hike faster than me, because they are younger. I feel pretty badass when I hike faster than young people. I really like their wide-eyed wonder when we explain where we started that day and it took them two days to get to the same point, they are exhausted and ready to quit and we have another 5 miles to go.
Forget about the pack. Apply the question to our bodies. Why is it so hard to lose weight?
I think the paradox is that we consume calories, which are just energy and therefore no mass. But when I get on the scales, I'm not measuring calories, I'm measuring pounds, which have no energy and a lot of mass. And because the pounds have no energy, it's really hard to climb the hills. On the other hand, if I drink water, which has no calories and no energy, but has a lot of pounds, it doesn't add any real mass because of excessive respiration and perspiration. Maybe we should have scales that measure how much energy we have, how many calories.
Words have to be taken in context. If someone thinks that a quarter after the hour means 25 minutes they weren't educated very well by their parents...In a former life I was a high school math teacher. While there is humor in this story, there's also the tragedy of widespread numerical illiteracy. It's kinda like fat jokes. In America we're all fat, so we tell fat jokes as a way of coping and poking fun at ourselves. But it's tragic that we're all fat. (Yes, yes, I know that we're not ALL fat, but you know what I mean).
Thank you Puddlefish (edit: originally said Astro) for sharing the story!
Seems like every year when I was teaching, even with the smarter kids, there would be a point where somebody asked what time it was, and the reply was, it's "quarter till" or "quarter after" the hour. When I told them that some folks think "quarter" means 25, like 25 cents, therefore 25 minutes, but it REALLY means 1/4, like 15 minutes, all over the room I could see bulbs lighting up over their heads as comprehension came to them.
Somewhere all over WB, light bulbs are lighting up!
Lonehiker (MRT '22)
Each pound is equal to 3500 calories. That's how much you have to burn to lose a pound of weight. Or, you can eat 500 calories a day less.
But a pound of water has no calories. A pound of celery has a few calories. A pound of cheesecake has a million calories.
So a pound doesn't equal a pound.
How many calories in a pound of muscle? How many calories in a pound of bone?
I know what you're saying, that a pound of fat has 3500 calories. My mostly nonsense statement that you quoted was intended to bring attention to the various ways in which we measure. We count calories, but we measure pounds. If I consume 4 pounds of doughnuts, I guarantee I'll gain 5 pounds. But if I consume 4 pounds of water, have I gained weight for longer than a few hours? Nope.
At the beach this summer my nephew thought the walk from the cottage down to the little town center area was an impossibly long distance to walk, and so he drove every time he wanted to go there.
It was two long blocks.
I lent my car to someone this weekend, and I was reading that stupid delicious looking pizza thread. I was thinking it's a mere 3.7 miles, uphill to the local pizza shop, I could do that. Then I started thinking that the local pizza place is really average at best, and I really don't need the 1,500 calories, and I'd feel like an idiot carrying a pizza box with leftovers through town. Plus, I've never enjoyed road walks.
Kind of strange how easy it is to make excuses to talk myself out a road walk, that I'd think nothing of doing if it were in the woods.
Beer and Ice Cream Diet
As we all know, it takes 1 calorie to heat 1 gram of water 1 degree centigrade. Translated into meaningful terms, this means that if you eat a very cold dessert (generally consisting of water in large part), the natural processes which raise the consumed dessert to body temperature during the digestive cycle literally sucks the calories out of the only available source, your body fat.
For example, a dessert served and eaten at near 0 degrees C (32.2 deg. F) will in a short time be raised to the normal body temperature of 37 degrees C (98.6 deg. F). For each gram of dessert eaten, that process takes approximately 37 calories as stated above. The average dessert portion is 6 oz, or 168 grams. Therefore, by operation of thermodynamic law, 6,216 calories (1 cal./gm/deg. x 37 deg. x 168 gms) are extracted from body fat as the dessert's temperature is normalized. Allowing for the 1,200 latent calories in the dessert, the net calorie loss is approximately 5,000 calories.
Obviously, the more cold dessert you eat,the better off you are and the faster you will lose weight, if that is your goal. This process works equally well when drinking very cold beer in frosted glasses. Each ounce of beer contains 16 latent calories, but extracts 1,036 calories (6,216 cal. per 6 oz. portion) in the temperature normalizing process. Thus the net calorie loss per ounce of beer is 1,020 calories. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to calculate that 12,240 calories (12 oz. x 1,020 cal./oz.) are extracted from the body in the process of drinking a can of beer.
Frozen desserts, e.g., ice cream, are even more beneficial, since it takes 83 cal./gm to melt them (i.e., raise them to 0 deg. C) and an additional 37 cal./gm to further raise them to body temperature. The results here are really remarkable, and it beats running hands down.
Unfortunately, for those who eat pizza as an excuse to drink beer, pizza (loaded with latent calories and served above body temperature) induces an opposite effect. But, thankfully, as the astute reader should have already reasoned, the obvious solution is to drink a lot of beer with pizza and follow up immediately with large bowls of ice cream.We could all be thin if we were to adhere religiously to a pizza, beer, and ice cream diet.
Ha, I love it. Too bad I remember my high-school science and the difference between a calorie and a Calorie (or kilocalorie). Science measures in cal, food measures in kcal!
This math sounds compelling until one realizes that the "calorie" that is being measured when heating 1g of water 1 degree C is not the same as the "calorie" that we assign to food. Our food measurement is called a Calorie but it's actually a Kilocalorie, or 1000x more than a single calorie measured by a physicist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
So unfortunately I can't drink more and more beer and lose weight from my body bringing the water up to 98.6 F.But you clearly know this.
Reminds me of Archie Bunker's deductive reasoning skills when helping his young niece with her homework. The problem had to do with "A" starting out at some point at a certain speed, and "B" starting later at a faster speed. She had to figure out when B would catch A.
Archie thinks about it a while and finally says, "B will never catch A". "Why not"?, she asks. "Listen", he says. "When I was in school, B was already trying to catch A. If he hasn't caught him by now, well..."
He had a valid point. There's something to be said for the common sense type of reasoning.Reminds me of Archie Bunker's deductive reasoning skills when helping his young niece with her homework. The problem had to do with "A" starting out at some point at a certain speed, and "B" starting later at a faster speed. She had to figure out when B would catch A.
Archie thinks about it a while and finally says, "B will never catch A". "Why not"?, she asks. "Listen", he says. "When I was in school, B was already trying to catch A. If he hasn't caught him by now, well..."
In order to consume those "mass less" calories, you gotta bite into that pizza. If you know a pizza place that sells "mass less" pizza let me know!
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote