First, some quick review from Part I:
To lose one pound of fat you need to create a caloric deficit of 3500 calories between your body’s demands for energy and the amount of energy you consume.
You have just three ways to create this deficit:
- Consume fewer calories than your body needs (dieting).
- Sweat the pounds off through exercise without changing your diet.
- Combine exercise with reduced caloric intake.
If you eat too few calories, your body gets what it needs by breaking down your own lean tissue (muscle), not fat.
Today, we’ll look at weight loss method #2…Exercise Only.
We already know that to lose one pound of fat per week, you need to create a daily caloric deficit of 500 calories between what your body needs for energy and what its demands are for energy. But this assumes you’re eating at a maintenance level; that you’re eating just enough to maintain your weight. If you’ve been experiencing steady weight gain, you’ve obviously been consuming more calories than your body needs.
In this case you would actually need to exercise enough to compensate for the amount of calories over your daily needs plus the 500 calorie deficit. Let’s say you’ve put on 10 pounds over the past year. This equates to an extra 96 calories a day you need to burn to reach your goal, for a total of 596 calories per day.
To give you an idea of how much exercise that is, a 140-pound woman walking for one hour at a 3.5 m.p.h. pace burns approximately 370 calories. A 170 pound male walking at the same pace uses approximately 460 calories worth of energy.
So our hypothetical 180-pound woman from Part I needs to walk about 80 minutes each and every, single day to burn about 596 calories. For many people, finding 80 minutes every day to exercise may prove unrealistic and not missing even one single day of exercise will certainly prove challenging if not impossible.
Also, as your fitness level increases, you burn fewer calories. Your body becomes more efficient at performing the exercise and doesn’t need to work as hard. So over time, you need to work harder and harder to burn the same number of calories you did when you first began. Eventually your progress will flatten out; then you need to increase the amount of time spent exercising.
The truth of the matter is this…
You Can’t Outrun Your Mouth!
When it takes you forty minutes to work off the calories from one donut that took you five minutes to eat, you know it can’t work long-term.
Another point to consider is the impact food has on your weight loss exercise results. Just as you would never put regular unleaded fuel in a Ferrari and expect it to perform at its best, you can’t feed your body crap and expect optimum results.
Next, we’ll examine weight loss method #3, combining exercise with a reduced calorie diet.
