It is really frustrated when you are exercising and following some kind of diet, and you are not seeing the results that you are looking for. But you might be missing some of the key points of how weight loss actually works. There is really only one thing that matters when it comes to losing weight. And i am gonna tell you what that is.
The first issue might be that you are relying on exercise too much. Exercise helps you feel better, be less stiff and just be more healthy overall, but it doesn't burn off as many calories as you think it does. It is hard to give accurate figures because your calories expenditure depends on your weight.
And then the intensity that you are working at as well. But if you are cycling for an hour and you are about 180 pounds, you could be burning off about 450 calories. If you are running six miles per hour, which is about 10 kilometers per hour, that is a fairly decent pace in an hour, you could burn 600, maybe 650 calories, but that is an hour.
And not everybody has time to do an hour of cardio every single day. So if we go to that general equation where losing a pound of fat requires you to have a deficit of 3500 calories a week, which is 500 calories a day, you are gonna have to cycle for more than an hour, a day, or run for about 45 to 50 minutes to get that level of fat loss.
Just with exercise, weight training generally burns off even fewer calories, but that is not to say that it is not iseful. It does have the benefit of building muscle. Mass muscle is more metabolically active than fat. So it is burning off more calories, but that difference is not as great as most people think.
You mighy be burning off 50 to a hundred extra calories a day by putting on a reasonable amount of muscle. And it is not that easy to put on muscle. I still encourage weight training of course, because it helps you feel stronger and it tends to make you more likely to move more throughout the day.
If you are carrying a lot of fat, that tissue is not active, you are more likely to burn off more calories. If you have more muscle mass, that extra movement is something we call neat, non exercise activity thermogenesis, and that can contribute 10 to 15% of your total calorie expenditure for the day.
Your total daily energy expenditure is your basal metabolic rate. So that is just all the metabolic processes that your body does throughout the day plus neat, which i just talked about, plus the thermic effect of food and any exercise that you do. So roughly broken down for most people as 60-70% for BMR, nea is 10 to 15%.
The thermic effect of food is about 10%. So that is where the quality of your food and the macronutrient content of your food, whether it contains protein or fiber makes a difference. Highly processed foods, for instance, have a lower thermic effect.
It does not take as much effort fir your body to burn them off, but these are all relatively minor numbers. When it comes to the big picture. In comparison to nutrition. Usually nutrition will account for about 80 to 90% of your weight loss results. Ignoring diet makes it really hard to lose weight.
It is actually okay to skip a week or two of exercise. You don’t do as much damge to your weight as you think, but adding too many calories for a couple of weeks, that will make an impact, but i am deiting people often ask me what i recommend in terms of diet. Is it intermittent, fasting or paleo vegan or vegetarian, the Mediterranean diet or clean eating or keto?
And the short answer is, it depends, for me, the most important thing for lasting weight loss is consistency. Can you maintain that diet over the long term? The only absolute requirement is that diet allows you to get into a calorie deficit so that you are burning off more calories than your body needs on a daily basis.
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