Burning Calories
The Top 100 Weight Loss Tips continues now with article number 74 as we continue to count backwards from 100 all the way up to 1, in case you haven't noticed!
In this post, the tip I'll be giving you is an excellent one in terms of stopping you making a big mistake that plenty of dieters do when it comes to burning calories.
That mistake is to believe that if they consume fewer calories than their daily allowance, they can exercise less and they'll still lose weight. Sort of like saving the unused calorie amount for a rainy day. Wrong! Here's why:
How to Burn Calories
The way it works is if you decrease your calorie intake through your diet without actually increasing your level of physical activity, your body will think it is being starved and go into survival mode. That means it will store as many of those calories as it can as fat, because it's not getting nearly enough of them.
So it will save them for a rainy day as fat cells because your body is programmed to react that way to times when food is short.
However, when you start to do workout exercises, you switch your body’s natural metabolic process to burning calories instead of saving them. That's because you are using muscles to do the exercise and they require fuel to be able to do the work.
That fuel comes from the calories your body consumes and assimilates. Exercise and calories burned go together hand in hand! Here's how it works:
Exercise Uses Energy
First, those consumed calories are processed and broken down, then sent into the bloodstream as burnable sugars (glucose) which go directly to your muscles that need them as fuel. If only a few muscles are using that fuel, the excess is stored as fat for future use.
But the more of your muscles that demand the fuel, the more your body must continually supply the bloodstream with those sugars as fuel for your muscles to use up. If you are exercising daily, that means your body doesn't get the chance to store any excess calories as fat because it's using them all up as it consumes them.
In this case, the exercise calories burned equals your calorie intake through diet.
That's why when you see people who look slim and toned, they are able to eat far more than you can and have a more interesting diet. It's because their bodies are continually using all the calories they consume to feed their muscles as they work out and exercise every day to achieve that slim toned body look.
The calories burned during exercise can't get stored as fat! And the kinds of exercises they do don't really matter because whether they're walking calories, swimming calories, running calories or weight training calories, they're all the same thing!
Toned and Strong
The knock on effect of regular exercise is that as your muscles become stronger because of all that extra work, they require more fuel to burn to keep them working. This means that your calorie count intake can increase as your muscles demand more fuel and you won't put on any extra fat (or weight).
So hopefully you can now see why dieting alone will not cause you to lose weight and keep it off in the long term. You will lose weight fast initially, but then that rate of weight lost slows down as your body starts to hoard every spare calorie. This is why many dieters start to gain weight again even though they seem to be eating hardly anything.
Exercise combined with diet is the key to true, sustainable weight loss success. That's because you're simply burning calories as fast as you're consuming them!
100 Weight Loss Tips number 73 follows in the next post!
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Posted on Sat, 25 Jul 2009 in Top 100 Weight Loss Tips | 3 Comments
3 thoughts on "Burning Calories"
Terry says:
You're welcome Vaughan. Its all about exercise combined woth good diet that leads to the weight loss from burning more calories than we consume.
Vaughan says:
There is much to learn about the way in which the body burns calories and how that generates a loss in weight, but your information is useful and accurate. Thank you for this excellent post.
Vaughan
Barias says:
Before going for any diet plan first of all you need to consider your eating habits. Check your daily intake of calories with respect to your gender requirement. Analyze if you were eating the right way or not. Make a checklist of items that should be dropped from your daily routine if you are determine to lose weight.