Serving Size and Calorie Counting

When you want to lose body fat, the only way to do it is to burn more calories than you consume.  If you burn approximately 3500 calories more than you eat, your body will metabolize about 1 pound of fat to make up the difference.  Now this has some interesting implications...  Can you lose weight eating only Krispy Kreme donuts?  Well, yes.  You just need to eat less calories worth than you consume.  Of course, an all-Krispy-Kreme diet would almost certainly lead to other nutritional complications.  You would also probably be hungry most of the time because eating few enough donuts to lose weight would probably not be very satisfying.  But it could be done.

If you are keeping track of you calorie intake, it is important to know what your actual calorie count is.  Small errors add up over time.  An extra 10 calories a day, which is less than one teaspoon of sugar, adds up to 3650 calories over a year; that's more than a pound of fat!  Fortunately, there are standard nutrition facts labels on virtually all packaged foods sold in the United States, like this one on tortilla chips:

So, according to this label, the serving size is 28 grams, which is 140 calories.  The FDA has rounding rules that allow manufacturers to round to the nearest 10 calorie increment for values >50 calories, so that means the real value is somewhere between 135.0 and 144.9 calories per 28 gram serving.  Also, most people don't have or regularly use a food scale, so the label often helpfully provides a translation of the serving size into pieces.  Here that is "About 13 chips."  So when I was making nachos the other day I wondered "how close is 'about?'"  The answer was, not too close:

Counting out 13 of the most uniform chips I could find onto a scale (yes, I zeroed out the paper plate), I measured 34.7g, which is 6.7g, or 24% more than the 28g serving size.  That means that if I count out 13 chips and think I'm eating 140 calories, I would really be getting closer to 174 calories.  To get the 28g serving size, I should really eat about 10.5 chips.

To be really precise, I should note that the primary measure for the serving size is given as 1 ounce, which is really closer to 28.35 grams.  But that .35 grams is an error of only 1.25%, which is dwarfed by the 24% error above.  There is also some normal chip-to-chip variation, which I didn't measure.  And often a "chip" is actually broken and missing part.  But ultimately, if you want to confirm serving size, the best way to do it is by weighing your food.

Do you ever keep track of your calorie intake?  Leave a comment below!

Post-A-Week Goal

A bit over a year ago, I set a goal to write a blog entry every day for a month.  I managed to carry through on it, even though it wasn't particularly easy to hold to the commitment every day.  I did not, however, take the next step from that goal, and continue making regular progress on other writing projects, or even here.  So I'm setting another blogging goal.  The goal this time is to write at least one posting here each week for the next year. If I pull it off, that means that I will write over 50 posts in the next year.  Seeing that cumulative progress is, I think, a useful step toward getting myself revved up to do other, larger scale writing projects.

Of course, one of the problems with a "Post-A-Week" is that at least one day each week I'll have to actually finish something and click the "Publish Post" button.  When I get toward the end of any given week, it then becomes a post-a-day goal, for that one day.  So I should try to make sure that I write early in the week, and not late, to keep ahead of the curve.  If my daughter ever reads this, she'll recognize this strategy from the last 5 years of me prodding her about starting her homework early.

For the purposes of this goal, I'll say that the week extends from Sunday through Saturday.  And as it is currently 12:20 AM on Sunday, November 13, 2011, this entry will fulfill my obligation for the week of the 13th - 19th!  Of course, I can write MORE than one a week if time and motivation allow, and I'll certainly try.  But at least this week I'm finishing over 167 hours ahead of my deadline!

I've got dozens of ideas jotted down, and about 25 partially written posts already stock-piled.  Time to start working through the backlog, polishing things up, and get them out into the world.  And then come up with more!

How about you?  What are you planning to do over the course of the next year?  Leave a comment below and tell me!

Wait, what?

Today a co-worker sitting next to me in the lab sent me a file on Skype.  A moment later he said, "Oops, wrong file, cancel it."  So I clicked on the "Cancel" button next to the Skype file transfer bar and was greeted with this dialog box:

That's right, to cancel the file transfer you have to click "Ok," and to NOT cancel the file transfer, you click "Cancel," which is to say, "Cancel the cancellation."

I went looking around and Microsoft does indeed discourage this kind of silliness.  In an article on correct UI design here they say:


"... Never use OK and Cancel for yes or no questions.

Incorrect:

Correct:

Better:
"

Of course, this is made more amusing by the fact that Microsoft recently completed their acquisition of Skype.    Maybe they'll fix this in the next update.  Oops, nope, according to the release notes for the latest update it looks like they're focusing on more important issues:

"Changes:

• Removed Google product bundling..."

So, what goofy or needlessly confusing user interface designs have you run into recently?  Leave a comment!