Here’s how to use insights from new weight-loss research to help you peel off the pounds fast and efficiently.
It’s an old chestnut of the fitness industry, the notion that for every 3,500 calories you burn you’ll lose a pound of fat. As a personal trainer, though, I often see guys slogging through week after week of running, walking, lifting, whatever — workouts designed specifically to reach that 3,500-calorie-per-week mark — only to weigh exactly the same when it’s over. What gives?
The problem with that old weight-loss formula, researchers now say, is that it doesn’t take into account what goes on when you’re not exercising: the calories you would have burned anyway, the calories you’ll add from overeating after overtraining, and the ones you won’t burn the next day because you’re too sore to move. The old weight-loss math assumed that your body was like a block of marble and that by systematically chiseling away at it with exercise you could gradually get rid of the undesirable stuff and end up with Michelangelo abs. But your body’s not a block of marble; it’s in a constant tug-of-war between consuming and burning calories, whether you’re eating, sleeping, reading, or watching TV. So the calculus for getting rid of that pound is far more complex than just subtracting the “calories burned” number from your weekly goal at the end of each workout. “The 3,500-calorie figure is theoretically correct,” says Ralph La Forge, the managing director of Duke University Medical Center’s Lipid and Disease Management Preceptorship Program. That is, if you burn that fat in a closed container under laboratory conditions.
Weigh yourself regularly to measure results.La Forge’s work points to a number of reasons why you can sweat your ass off on a daily basis and yet still end up with the same size ass. And they all go back to a failure to understand the way the body really burns calories. For starters, you may overestimate the number of calories your workout effectively expends. For the average 180-pound guy, walking slowly for an hour uses approximately 200 calories. Trouble is, you can’t just take that 200 and subtract it from your 3,500-calorie goal. You also have to consider the calories you would have gone through during that hour even if you were sitting on the couch. A 180-pound guy burns around 90 calories per hour just by being awake, so during your one-hour walk you will have burned just 110 more calories than if you weren’t exercising at all. That number — what La Forge calls the “net energy cost” — is the important one. It’s how many extra calories you’ve actually used.
You may also be building muscle while you lose fat, particularly if you’ve started a new program or if you’re lifting weights. This is a nice problem to have; the more muscle you add the more readily your body will burn calories. But if you aren’t keeping track of your body-fat percentage, the lack of results on the scale can be a demoralizing kick in the gut at the end of a rigorous week of training.
You might also be sabotaging your weight loss goals by training too hard. Burning 700calories on a hard bike ride is good, but if you’re so dead afterward that you spend the rest of the day on the couch, you have to consider the calories that you won’t use because you’re too tired to walk the dog. Plus, overtraining can lead to an increased appetite. If you’re so hungry after your bike ride that you eat an extra cheeseburger (310 calories), the net calorie burn for your workout drops from 700 to 390.
The bottom line: You’ve got to exercise more than you thought.
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