One year

I believe that today is number 365 of My Life with Apple Watch [not iWatch].

I have decided that of all the metrics for moving around and being busy on a daily basis, the most useful for me is “Move,” that is, the red ring. Move is portrayed as calories over baseline/basal counts (the calories needed to exist). Move clearly reacts to walking or running, and I assume cycling and swimming and skiing. Move still increases if you are active but not walking, and say gardening or house-cleaning. On this: yay for Move measurements.

Other places, Apple refers to Move as Active Energy, and and the basal metabolism as Resting Energy. Apple indicates that the units of both are calories, by which they mean calories just as you see listed in nutrition tables.

It is my belief that both these Energy measures exceed non-Apple calorie counts, so that they are below 75% of non-Apple calories, at about 72–73%. I derived this from looking at my two energies versus my approximate calorie intake, and watching it closely for weeks on end.

So I was not surprised to read this week a NYT article, “Your Workout Burns Fewer Calories Than You Think,” by Gretchen Reynolds (September 22), which says that despite careful measurements of energy expenditure, “most people seemed to be burning only about 72 percent as many additional calories, on average, as would be expected, given their activity levels.” I promise you I came up with 72% before I read the Reynolds article. The scientists who did the study do not know why the descrepancy.

I have said for a long time that a calorie is real and accurate in a test tube and in a laboratory, and it’s a great concept, but that energy does not measure the same in a body. Somehow.

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