Burn, Baby, Burn! The truth about burning calories !

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Burn, Baby, Burn! The truth about burning calories !

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Before you reach for an extra croissant in the belief that your three-mile morning walk burned off an extra 300 calories (100 calories per mile), you might want to know that determining the amount of extra calories—calories your body doesn’t need to maintain your current weight—you actually burned is more tricky than a straight per-mile calculation. Why? There are several factors that come into play to determine how much of an actual caloric deficit you experience in a given exercise. If you are trying to lose weight by burning more calories each day than you need, consider the following:

• The calories you burn during your workout include calories you would normally burn if you were just sitting around daydreaming. In order for us to stay alive, to keep our hearts beating, lungs breathing, all metabolic processes functioning, our bodies have to burn energy. This is known as the resting metabolic rate, which actually accounts for about two-thirds of all the calories we burn in a given day! Take the example of the 300 calorie walk: If you weigh around 150 pounds and walked at a 3.5 mph pace you would burn approximately 160 extra net calories; the other 140 calories you would have burned anyway during that same time period--even if you were doing absolutely nothing. So your net caloric expenditure is 160, not 300. Probably not enough to cover a buttery croissant. This should not discourage you, just know that total calories burned does not equal total unneeded calories burned. Message: The calories the calorie counter on an exercise machine says you burned is only an estimation.

• Intensity Matters: They used to say it was important to go for the long burn—to work out for a long time at lower intensity to burn fat stores. Now the thinking is that the more vigorous and efficient your workout, the greater your net caloric expenditure—and the closer your gross caloric expenditure will be to your net energy cost. In other words, you will burn more extra calories doing shorter bouts of higher intensity exercise (running for 20 minutes rather than walking for 40 minutes) than longer bouts of exercise at a lower intensity. Message: work out as hard as you can for a shorter time; you’ll burn more calories and have more time to do other things.

• You’ve probably been told that you will continue to burn extra calories for several hours after your aerobic workout. This is called excess post-workout oxygen consumption (EPOC). While this effect does exist, it varies widely from 10 to as high as 150 kcal. In fact, to really have a significant effect on weight loss and caloric deficit, your workouts would have to be both high intensity and long in duration—something only the extremely conditioned can realistically do. Message: Focus on working hard during your workout, but don’t count too much on burning significant calories after you’re done.

• That said, it’s important to note that you don’t want to work out too hard and for so long that you end up exhausted and sharply curtail the rest of your activity for the day. It doesn’t make much sense to burn 600 calories during a very intense workout only to return home too tired to do much of anything else for the rest of the day other than lie around. Remember, just normal every day activity burns far more calories than resting. So in a sense you are undermining your weight loss efforts if you deplete yourself of energy. Message: Exercise should energize, not exhaust you.

Source: ACE Certified News August/September 2006. Vol.12, No. 5 "Exercise Determinants of Weight Loss" by Ralph La Forge

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Creator: thetrainerx
Category: Diet and Nutrition
Posted: 2/22/2008

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