How your lifestyle affects your metabolism

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Balanced lifestyle, balanced energy flow

Learning objective: All work and no play makes jack a large boy

The point of this task is to look at an 'average' lifestyle. This is a totally simplified approach to focus solely on the key learning objective. What you spend your time doing and how that affects your metabolism. 

Few people burn many calories when they work or rest. Yet they spend most of their time doing these two things. Especially if you consider things like washing the dishes and your weekly food shop as part of work and watching tv as rest. 

The time we spend actively moving and having fun is generally quite short lived. This task is an investigation into a better ratio of work rest and play.

In this task we use a generic energy value instead of calories to simplify things further.

 
Your aim is to balance a virtual metabolism using a spreadsheet as a guide. You need to achieve energy balance or an energy difference of 0. Here is an example (to get your own copy to work on click file > make a copy or visit 'How your lifestyle affects your metabolism: initial task' and choose 'use this template').  

 

 

The Level 1 spreadsheet is locked so you can't edit it. Either use the Level 1 playground sheet next to it (find it in the tabs at the bottom of the sheet) or create a copy for youself.  Just click the Level 1 tab at the bottom of the sheet. Select 'Copy to..'  from the pop up menu and choose a spreadsheet to copy Level 1 into. 

 

You can now play around with the activities values in our Lifestyle and metabolism app.it still needs a little work. For example the activities need labels. for now the sliders are in the order work, rest and play. it also needs instructions added. Sharing for now for those who might like to try it out. 

Task Discussion


  • Thys   July 21, 2011, 10:13 a.m.

    Spreadsheets don't give me an incentive to act. So, i will skip this task.

    Just by writng down an estimate of the amount of calories for every drink and food item, that enters my body through my mouth during the day, i can improve my consciousness of what i am eating. And so, just the writing down of each item, helps me to limit my daily food intake; it is a method that i use, when i am overweight; At the end of the day i can thus calculate, as a raw estimate, how much calories entered my body through my mouth.

    Overweight is a highly subjective idea.

    Belly circumference seems to be more en vogue than Body Mass Index. The first might be more predictive for heart disease, than the latter.