The Truth About Exercise and Weight Loss

If you’re trying to lose weight with exercise, you may have used an activity calculator to determine how many calories you're burning. For example, if you are 165 lbs and you go jogging for 30 minutes, this calculator shows you've burned about 371 calories. Not bad for a 30-minute workout, you might think, but are you getting the whole story? Not exactly. There are a few other things to consider when it comes to exercise and weight loss. Most calculators use activity, duration of your workout and your weight to come up with an estimate of calories burned, or what is known as gross calories burned. What we forget to factor in are the calories we would have burned if we weren't exercising, also known as the net calories burned. If you jogged during a time you normally watch TV, you're still burning more calories than you were, but you need to subtract the calories you would've burned while watching TV in order to get a more accurate calculation. You probably know that taking a leisurely stroll won't burn as many calories as, say, running a mile as fast as you can. How hard you work plays a role in how many calories you’re burning. Some calculators, especially those on cardio machines like treadmills and elliptical trainers, do take into account things like pace, resistance and incline. We also know the relative intensity of a number of activities, but using this information to estimate how much weight you’ll lose is tough. For example, if you were to burn 2,000 calories a week with a walking program, you might expect to lose about 6 pounds of fat after 10 weeks of exercise. The problem is, this assumes you burned exactly 2,000 calories each week and that 6 pounds of fat would generate exactly 6 pounds of body weight loss, which isn’t always the case. You probably never thought that being good at an activity would mean burning fewer calories, but that’s exactly what happens when you exercise consistently. Think about the first time you tried a treadmill or some other cardio machine. You probably felt awkward, holding onto the rails and worrying you might fall off. Over time, the movement became so natural, you didn’t have to think about it anymore. As your body became more efficient, you stopped wasting energy on unnecessary movements, which leads to fewer calories burned.