I hope I make sesne. I could have sworn I read RockinRobin say something about the calories in doesn't have anything to do with the calories you burn exercising- that they are separate. So, how does the exercise/calorie counting combination help with weight loss. If what we take in is what we take in how does exercise contribute? I hope I am making sense.
Exercise contributes to weight loss in a few ways.
-- Extra calories burned during formal exercise help to create a larger calorie deficit (the calorie deficit is the difference between what you burn and what you eat). A larger calorie deficit equals more weight lost.
-- Exercise that is sufficiently vigorous (such as moderate-intensity cardio or weight lifting) stimulates the body to use more calories after the exercise is over for a period of a few to even 36 hours. For me personally, this seems to contribute an extra burn of perhaps 200-300 calories per day.
-- Building muscles with weight-training will help you burn slightly more calories all the time, because muscle is more metabolically active than fat. This really isn't a huge difference, though; muscle burns something like 6 calories per pound per hour, whereas fat burns something like 4 calories per pound per hour (I can't remember the exact numbers, but it's definitely not a huge difference). Having an extra pound of muscle, therefore, will help you burn slightly more calories every day.
What I believe Robin means is that you don't want to get into a game of 'I burned 300 calories on that treadmill, so I can have this doughnut".
The problem with this is that the number of calories burned is very hard to estimate with accuracy--the counter may TELL you you burned 300 calories, but it may well be 100 or less.
Calories consumed is also not precise: water content varies in food, nutritional information may be incorrect, etc.
Because of this, you have to look at the whole pattern, and not try to nickle and dime it. Even if your calories consumed/burned estimates are incorrect, they are probably consistently incorrect (over or under by about the same %), so you have to work with that: if you are exercising the same every week, and eating the same every week, how much weight you are losing each week on average IS your calorie deficit, whatever various counters (in or out) tell you it should be.
If that rate is too slow, you need to eat less and/or exercise more. If that rate is fast enough BUT unsustainable (because you are starving all the time), you need to eat more or exercise less.
I have upped my calories when I upped my exercise, but only in a response to increased HUNGER, not because of how many calories I hoped I burned. As long as I keep losing weight at a steady rate, that's ok.
Well, I'm not RockinRobin, but I'll try to show what I think she was saying. Let's say that before you started trying to lose weight, you were eating 2000 calories a day and not exercising. If you're aiming for a one pound loss per week, you need to eat 500 fewer calories than you used to, or burn 500 more calories than you used to, or a combination of the two, every day. So you might choose to eat 1750 calories a day, and work out enough to burn 250 calories. Other options are eating 1500 calories a day, or eating 2000 calories a day and working out enough to burn 500 calories.
What you wouldn't do is eat 1750 calories, burn 250 calories and then eat an additional 250 calories the same day because you exercised. That puts your deficit for the day at only 250. (Which technically is OK, but it means you'll only be losing half a pound a week).
One problem is that it's really hard to gauge how many calories you're really burning when you exercise. So just because the machine says you burned 400 calories (or the infomercial says you'll burn 1000 in an hour), you probably didn't burn anywhere near that many. And as your body gets more efficient doing a particular exercise, it burns fewer calories than it used to when you first started that exercise. For that reason, I'll usually lower my calorie count by 500 a day, but not try to keep track of my calories burned. WarMaiden explained some good reasons to exercise anyway.
What I say is that I keep my calories consumed totally and completely separate from what I burn. I eat what I eat, I burn what I burn. Because I exercised more, was particularly active that day (or in active) doesn't change and plays NO FACTOR in what I eat.
Anything I burn due to movement or exercise is a BONUS in the calorie DEFICIT department. And yes, I'm all for added movement! I do believe exercise is a big boon to weight loss AND good health.
I track my calories coming in. I never, ever keep tabs on what I burned, because like has been mentioned, there is no accurate or even close to accurate way to do so. And even if there was, again, it wouldn't change my calorie consumption.
I'm pretty much the same as Robin, unless I am doing extreme activity (for example, when I was doing Relay for Life and walked for 8 hours and ran for 1, I did eat a little extra so I would be properly fueled...not to mention it was the middle of the night when I'd normally be sleeping, and 8 hours of walking on no food would be a bad idea for me)...If I was doing a very long hike, or helping someone move and lifting boxes all day, or any other extreme of activity, I'd probably eat more if I was hungry, knowing that my calorie output was far, far greater than my usual.
What I don't do is try to figure out what I burn on a normal-ish day and adjust my eating. It's a very rare day that I do enough exercise that I genuinely need more food.
thanks for asking this, i was wondering how it all worked. I've always counted my exercise calories and never got anywhere. Now I'll switch it up. Thanks!
How does the calorie/exercise combo work?
